


the gallows in paradise

by klickitats



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Avvar, Blood Magic, Casual Hegemony, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Lyrium Ghost Leliana, Post-What Pride Had Wrought, Treachery, Under Her Skin, Weird Lyrium Stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-08 15:51:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10390287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klickitats/pseuds/klickitats
Summary: The war against Corypheus approaches its natural end. Leliana finds his general, Calpernia, half-dead in a river and attempts to make her a tool for Inquisition use. But knives cut both ways, and Calpernia discovers a mystery to unravel Leliana's entire world.





	1. a better instinct

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveriris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveriris/gifts).



> Joanna Berry's short story about Calpernia, "Paying the Ferryman," is an excellent little read if you want more about her. 
> 
> This takes place in a world state where the Inquisitor doesn't try to convince Calpernia to leave Corypheus at the Well of Sorrows. Rather than fall to the Inquisition, she flings herself off the cliffs and into the waterfall. If that wasn't a hint, there's some dark stuff here when it comes to matters of life and death, as well as discussion of the frank realities of Leliana's work--violence, references to torture, etc. Being a spymaster's not the prettiest job, but it _is_ the most dramatic.

The well-made house sloped in a mound, disguised with a thatching of clay and straw. If not for the smoke creeping out from a hole in the top, Leliana might have mistaken it for a hill at a distance. The inside smelled of clean herbs, and melting snow, boiling up in cast-iron kettle. Her hair stuck to her forehead in sweat; she pulled her gloves off and the tips of her fingers tingled in the warm air. Blood rushed back into them.

As a child, Leliana’s mother kissed her cold fingertips when they prickled, and promised it was fire—perhaps if she tried hard enough, they’d glow like lit candles.

“Pillar,” said Havar, looking up from her worktable. Her hands continued to grind the contents of her mortar and pestle into a fine pulp. “It’s good you’ve come.”

Leliana learned a year ago to stop wincing at the moniker. Havar Salt Stone was an augur’s servant, sent to the Inquisition after a resounding alliance with the Avvar delivered them a band of agents, a few supplied from every clan. Enough to make up a unit in Cullen’s army, and a handful for Leliana to utilize as eyes and ears.

Havar was neither. Havar found her up in the winding tower, sat down at her feet as she stood and tended the birds, and held out wide, scarred hands. Havar been sent by the mage-priestess she served her whole life, told _You will see a pillar, tall as a snowy mountain, and serve._

 _No, thank you_ was somewhat lost in translation, and now they were here. Havar built her home with her own two hands, and Leliana used it as a way-station and bolthole for agents who could or should not walk through Skyhold’s gates.

 _All those miserable code names you give your agents,_ Josephine laughed. _I like the one she gave you._

“Will she live?” Leliana asked.

They both looked down at the motionless figure on the pallet next to the fire. A thick blanket covered the body from scalp to toe, with the exception of one dirty foot, sticking out from under the hem. A deep gash marked the top, crusted closed with blood.

Was it the heat in the hovel making her vision hazy? A dizziness gripped Leliana for a moment, and when she looked down at her hands, she couldn’t see them. They rippled in and out of vision, like waves of steam, and she found herself hurriedly pulling her gloves back on. She could see the leather, trust her fingers still inside it. She flexed them, over and over, felt the sweat dripping down the back of her neck.

 _Thump, thump, thump_ went the mortar. “Depends,” Havar said.

“You told me you were the best.”

“I am.” Havar divided the brown leavings between a wooden bowl and a stone bowl, and seized a vial from the table, yanking the cork out with her teeth. Leliana couldn’t say how she was sure, but she knew it was fermented blood. Ox, perhaps, or horse. Havar dribbled a little into the wooden bowl, mashed it in with a dirty thumb. “But you haven’t decided.”

“Say something, or don’t, Havar.” Her voice was clipped, firm. “I didn’t come down to interpret omens.”

She nodded. “No,” she agreed. “You came to see the end of it.”

Leliana’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “So she’s beyond saving.”

“Eh,” Havar shrugged, waving her hand. “Rough fight, to stay in the world of the living. But not impossible. You—look.” She picked up the bowls from the tabletop, one in each hand, and held them up for Leliana to examine. “You want to let her go, I’ll guide her way.”

She looked briefly between the two bowls and sighed, despite herself. She’d grown fond of Havar’s ritual dramatics, and even now she looked like an Avvar statue in the center of Val Royeaux—the scales of justice, cradling cups of life and death.

“She serves the One who Breaks the Sky.” Havar’s brow knit itself in seriousness. “She tried to kill my people. Yours. Lots of bodies to her name, and too soon to forget any of it.” She raised the stone bowl in her hand.

But patience wore thin. “I’m not—”

“She knew this, maybe,” Havar interrupted, “when she tried to die.”

Silence, before Leliana said, “You cannot mean for me to choose,” as though she’d never stood before life and death and pointed her finger at one or the other. Leliana preferred to decide such matters without an audience. Witnesses liked to reminisce. She looked down at her gloves again, and then closed her eyes. “Let the Maker decide her fate.”

But Havar remembered too much. “You ordered they bring her here.”

Only to make sure the Venatori didn’t have a body to hoist as a martyred princess. What a picture it made—how she threw herself from the cliffs into the river, rather than be captured or killed by Inquisition forces. What a chance they’d found her breathing at all. _Don’t know how it happened, but she’s just in pieces_ , the report read. Leliana tucked her hood around her head, and turned to duck out of the warm hut without another word. It was not why she’d come.

“Pillar,” called Havar. “A choice.”

She was a traitor and a murderer. The flames of Haven still fanned the back of her neck. She had no reason to pause.

But she did, before ducking out of the warm tent. “Try,” she said, and left.

~~~

Nearly three months passed before she thought of the body lying still on the pallet. Not until Kamilah Adaar, grey skin gone pallid with worry, marched into Leliana’s office. The ravens cawed and fluttered loudly in their mews when she entered. She batted one of them once in the early days of the Inquisition with the back of her hand. It followed too close and made her suspicious. They never forgot a face.

“Inquisitor,” Leliana said, without so much as a glance up. The ravens quieted at the sound of her voice. “To what do I owe the pleasure?

Adaar’s voice, disarmingly casual. “It’s time to rid the south of the Venatori.”

Leliana’s quill paused on the page, and she raised her head carefully. “Are we not already working towards the goal?”

“Their confidence makes me sick.” She crossed her arms. “They hit Griffon Wing Keep every other week, and raid villages in Orlais by moonlight. And I got a report they’re taking kids in their sleep from South Reach. Ferelden’s pissed.”

“Inquisitor.” Leliana clucked her tongue, but it was a mistake, and only riled her further, smoke practically billowing from her ears. A headache began throbbing behind her ear. It made Adaar’s face wobble in two, and then slide back together again.

Then she ground her mighty jaw and said, “We’re so close to burning Corypheus off the face of this earth I can smell his arse-hair scorching, but we can’t crush these roaches?” Her nostrils flared. “I don’t care if Ferelden stops supporting us, but I don’t want to lose our holds on the Storm Coast and in the mountains, and that’s the first thing they’ll take back. Orlais sends me a letter every day about Griffon Wing. I’m tired of it.”

It had been a few months since she’d witnessed this level of upset from their Inquisitor, so she supposed it was due. She was struggling not to huff and puff in her distress, her hands flat on Leliana’s desk to keep them from clenching into fists. She was a big woman (they called her _Half Mountain_ all over Thedas, a name bestowed by the Avvar and caught by gleeful rumor), who wielded an axe in each hand. The Iron Bull was a full head shorter—Leliana watched her sling him to the ground once in a deliciously competitive bout of mud-wrestling one spring in the courtyard. She and Josephine had lost three sovereigns each to Cullen, but the victory was so complete it evaporated any sourness in losing. Adaar won by straddling his enormous chest, knees locked on either side of his head, until his palm smacked the ground for mercy.

Years ago, now

“You’re right,” Leliana said, more to calm her down than anything else

“Of course I am,” she retorted. “Figure this out. Soldiers are too sloppy and Josephine can’t be arsed to do anything other than kiss Celene’s slippers.” It wasn’t true, but Adaar made up her mind the moment she met Josephine that she could not trust this well-dressed beignet any farther than she could throw her—metaphorically. Bureaucrats and pacifists did not understand the cruelty of Adaar’s world, and she had no desire to educate them.

Adaar did not trust mages, nobles, diplomats. Adaar did not trust anyone. The fact she’d come to Leliana at all instead of striding off across the continent was unprecedented. In the early days of the Inquisition, she’d spent too much time in the Hinterlands, met too many orphans clamoring for attention and scraps for their bellies. She didn’t sleep four nights of seven. Leliana’s people kept a close watch, and she kept meticulous records of their requests, and how long they took to complete. She insisted on revitalizing systems, roads, even though she’d no idea how to do it herself. More outposts. More soldiers. There wasn’t a scrap of Inquisition gain that didn’t have eyes and swords on it.

She was a mercenary who learned she could use the law like an arm or a boot to stamp down the unworthy. She loved it, because it obeyed.

“I want agents scouring the continent. Cut their leadership out of our bones.” Adaar ran a hand over her face. “And get them out of my hair.”

“We won’t stand for it,” Leliana promised, because Adaar’s word was law, and not the other way around. “I won’t let it continue.” She pressed her gloved hand against her breast. “I promise.”

It was enough for now. Adaar turned to find the door. She paused, just before the cages, and looked over her shoulder. “I thought we were past this petty shit with them.”

“Not until Corypheus is gone.”

She nodded. “If you miss one nit, you miss ten.” She seemed to mull over her thoughts before striding out the door. “By any means necessary, Leliana. Take care of it.”

The words jolted her like a cold, unexpected touch to bare skin.

~~~

 _By any means necessary._ The thought should have only escorted her to the ravens and back to her desk, but after letting them fly, she found herself halfway down the mountain. She could not remember how she had gotten there. This did not surprise.

 _The occasional gap in memory is common after a life such as yours._ Vivienne’s voice, curt and without an inch of pity. She’d never told Vivienne anything about her life, but a few runes painted on the inside of her arm and a brief conversation about her symptoms provided a clear enough picture. Her words were not kind, and so exactly what she required.

The episodes had begun at Haven and somewhat increased in frequency as the Inquisition yawned on—she never found herself anywhere other than where she should be, but it was as though she appeared from thin air. Her body, moving on its own, and having no qualms about letting her know its plans for where to go.

Headaches, frequent and sharp, could be attributed to stress. A high, airy warble settled in her ears seemingly at random, as though a little piece of her mind needed to voice a complaint. This too, Vivienne said, was a natural result of her existence.

So Vivienne’s only instruction was a promise. _For now it is an inconvenience. Find me when it becomes a problem._

When she knocked on the door of Havar’s hut, opening the door and stepping in when a call of _come in_ beckoned her inside, she wondered how close she’d brushed up against that line.

Havar whittled a wooden spoon next to her smoldering hearth, pushed a lock of loose hair out of her face. “Pillar,” she said, by way of greeting. “I wondered when you’d be back.”

Her coarse hair was black, with thick streaks of grey—it had started to go that way years before, and in the right light some of her roots were so pale they were nearly white. She kept it bound in a mess directly atop her head, and today it looked more rumpled than ever. It suited her perfectly.

The house was cooler now, the fire banked. Even one of the windows was cracked open, and the cold, pale light of the winter shown in.

And then there was a voice. “I supposed it must be you.”

The pallet was shoved in a corner under a window, and the body there was no longer a tumble of bones and muscle, covered by burlap, but upright. It leaned against the wall, wrapped tightly in furs. She was bundled against the cold—no, Leliana realized, she was well and truly strapped in with leather belts.

“Havar.” Leliana turned on her heel. “Has she tried—”

“It’s to keep her together,” Havar said with a grin. Little specks of soot dusted her nose from the fire. “Not to keep her from me. Don’t worry.”

Calpernia said, “The Maker’s afterlife is so much more _incisive_ than I ever expected,” and turned her head back to the light.

Her voice in the flesh continued to take Leliana aback—cold and fastidious, clipped in its accent. She sounded as though she’d been raised by governesses from birth. It had been the clearest thing about her to come through from the wavy images in Dagna’s crystals.

A cut bisected her eyebrow, slashed across her nose, and marked her cheek. A faint scar would remain, only to be caught in certain light. Heavy bags rested under her eyes. Her cornstalk hair draped long and matted down her back. Dirt on her face, behind her ears, rubbed along her neck.

She looked broken, Leliana thought, but not beaten.

“So,” she said. “Betrayed from all sides.” She dragged a rough-hewn chair from Havar’s table across the floor and sat a good meter and a half from where Calpernia’s pallet jammed against the wall. It was just far enough that any meager magic she could manage would fall just short of her boot. She doubted she could even summon a barrier. But even so, as she did whenever she walked through a door’s threshold, she counted every knife and weapon on her person.

She wore six knives—each arm, each ankle, her back and a small, gold thing that hung between her breasts. A gift from Josephine many years ago. Those, and a handful of caltrops that made the ground around them erupt with little bolts of lightning. She meant to send them to Sera by way of one of her west-traveling agents this morning, and had forgotten.

Calpernia said nothing. Her face did not move. Her wide brown eyes followed a bird in flight outside until it fluttered out of view.

“What the Inquisitor told you was true,” Leliana continued. She kept her voice even and plain, almost bored. “Corypheus would have bound you to his will. She did you a service.”

“And what have you done me?” So she did not like silences. Or perhaps languishing for two months in the hovel with Havar and fire for company had taken its toll.

Leliana shrugged. “You are not dead.”

“One renders a service for what is needed.” Her head now rested against the wall. “I did not need to live.”

There would be no end to that argument; Leliana only said _try_ after all, in the name of heedless waste. “What is your name?” she asked. “Your real name.”

A little sneer. “Mine? Starling. Peacock. _Hen._ ”

“I doubt anyone among Tevinter’s underbelly has a name from ancient legend.” She kept her voice uninterested. “And surely not so unsubtle as a priestess of Dumat.”

Havar took her chance to interrupt. “Tea, Pillar?”

She nodded; it would give her a task to do while she pried answers out of her. The small bowl Havar handed her was filled with warm amber. A sip revealed mint, fennel, honey, black pepper, and nothing resembling a tea leaf.

“Corypheus himself will be dead before the year is out,” she began, “if that is of interest to you.” No reaction. “Even so, the Venatori remain a deep thorn in our foot.”

Calpernia rolled her eyes, so brief and tired she nearly missed it. “I heard you were the greatest shadow to ever stalk Thedas,” she said, “but you try to tease out of me what I—know you know.”

“I know you eluded our spies and created a force of mages we cannot master.” She thought to stroke the ego she knew must be boiling under Calpernia’s skin. No one who bade a god to fill them with power was without arrogance. It made their spines taut, and they always crippled with enough pressure. “Our campaigns across the west are marginally successful. They hit hard, fast, and disappear.”

“Wouldn’t you?” she asked. “You’re no stone-and-chess commander like the big oaf leading your troops. We value cleverness, not _rules._ ”

The disdainful way she said it would have made the corner of Leliana’s lip curl, if they had been a spymaster and her contact sequestered up in her tower, getting a report from a last mission. But she meant among the Venatori.

“I suppose your march on Haven felt more like an ambush than anything else.” She sipped her tea, watched the tendril of a fennel frond wave back and forth at the pit of the cup. “Of course, it’s no hardship to ambush a town of refugees and builders.”

“You deserved it, building your hopes in such an idiotic place.” She blinked more than once as she said it. She delivered the cold cruelty of the remark too quickly. Saying it so she didn’t say something else.

“Is that so?”

“I expected better.” Calpernia worked now, to keep her face as unreadable as ice. She opened her mouth, and then closed it in a tight line, and said no more.

Guilt, perhaps. Hard to identify whatever roiled beneath the surface, but Leliana was patient. “Either way, the Inquisition will always remember your great works.” Her great scars on their forces, their bodies.

She said, simply, “I only loved and served my country.”

“And Corypheus. Though now your little underlings have burned villages, taken children, and found a streak of creativity I didn’t know they possessed.”

Sloppy, perhaps, but she wanted to see how Calpernia dealt with surprise. She could make her face stone-blank, but even a few minutes in her presence revealed tells to Leliana. Her brows, for one, liked to knit in thought, as though the wrinkles that appeared in her forehead were lines to hold back disagreement.

In the rippling mirage from the crystal she had no eyes, only shadows, but—standing shoulder to shoulder with her in her office, as though they were two bodies in conversation, she could watch the tight movements of Calpernia’s jaw. How when she smiled, she never let Corypheus see her teeth.

Her nostrils flared infinitesimally now, her eyes narrowing on some spot outside. Another bird, perhaps, or the way one of the scrawny mountain trees bent in the sharp wind.

“Perhaps they grow desperate without a leader.” Leliana drained her tea, glanced at the leavings of herbs and seeds at the bottom. She learned how to read them once, or at least how to act an expertise. They tilted in the shape of a wrist, bent by great weight, but they were not even tea leaves.

Calpernia let out a huff of breath. “I don’t care what they do.” A lie, as large as it was amateur. “And I don’t care what you do to me.” The opposite.

“Very little will help your case with the Inquisitor,” Leliana said, “but think on the chance.”

For the first time, Calpernia turned her head to examine Leliana. The movement was slow, deliberate, and snake-like. Making the stiffness of her muscle and bone a choice, not a hindrance.

The anger in her brown eyes was the ever-present kind—it existed so deeply within her it could never be snuffed out. But a scalpel sharp curiosity overtook her face. Easy to mistake for cruelty, but Leliana recognized it as—a necessary measure. A defense. “And your case?” she asked. “Your god, your Inquisitor, or both?”

“Saving innocents is a priority for the Inquisition.” The question was odd. “I’m sure you’ve paid for our victories. We liberate.”

“Ah, that’s what _conscription_ means.” Her delicate eyebrow arched. “Templar and Warden alike bend at the waist to your great prophet.” She made a soft _tut-tut-tut_ sound. “But you must know what I hear, Sister Nightingale?”

The drama. Resisting a roll of her eyes nearly gave her a headache. “Please.”

“Skyhold is empty.” Calpernia let the silence fall expertly after the statement. The air chilled. Havar rustled a wooden dish at her table. “The ink on your treaties—dust. Your armies stand at attention, but the pilgrims? They no longer come.”

“Light reaches far.” Leliana gave a little shrug. “When it exists at every outpost across Thedas, there’s no need to journey all the way to the sun.”

The corner of her mouth curled with interest. “Fascinating,” she said, “how you do not deny it.”

No words then—but Leliana watched her eyes move as they searched her face, as though caught by distraction. The mood in them changed, curiosity giving way an intrusive, prying look—one she’d recognized in Josephine’s eyes often, once, when they spoke more frequently.

It reminded her of servants trying to open oysters at one of Celene’s more _ostentatoire_ parties. How they ran a tiny, curved knife along the jagged edge, until they found the precise spot to crack the shell open. She had watched a young elven girl do it, once, and find a dirty river pearl inside to pocket.

Her focus snapped, quick as a spark, and she turned her head back to the window. The pivot took Leliana aback. Calpernia could not hide—her revulsion, perhaps. Or perhaps she’d just realized the circumstances she sat inside.

“I don’t like looking at you.” She squinted at the window, as though Leliana were inconveniently placed sunlight. “If you’re going to put a knife to my neck, do it. I’m not bending to your Inquisitor.”

Instead, Leliana merely stood and handed her little bowl back to Havar, turned to leave. Havar had a roll of bandages twice as thick as her arm, sticks for splits, and a steaming bowl that smelled of wet dirt.

Calpernia was now trying to wiggle away from the window—she lost her balance, but Havar was there just in time. “Stop,” she said. “You don’t have any more bones to break, but quit trying.”

“Every bone broken.” Her pronounced nose—not as regal as Josephine’s, but elegant, memorable—tilted towards the ceiling. “We have myths that begin like this. Men broken into pieces, put back together by a hag with clay for glue. A great deal of blood involved, sometimes from an ox.”

Havar, not a day over thirty, only chuckled. The sound of one of those belts unbuckling. “And what happens after, _cailleach?_ ”

The word sounded like the clearing of a throat. Calpernia’s voice was clear as birdsong. “They stand taller than any keep, stronger than a druffalo.” She sounded like she was speaking of a memory. “After all, _you_ made their hands big enough to shake the world by the shoulders.”

~~~

Leliana allowed herself the walk back up to Skyhold for regret. Of course she said no. She had no power at her disposal other than the word.

 _I don’t like looking at you._ Into the face of her captor. It had to be. Leliana brushed aside the strange curiosity she’d seen in her eyes, even though the words scratched at the back of her mind.

She’d known it would fail. In her initial plan, she’d thought—only as a last resort. Perhaps Corphyeus’ broken doll could prove herself useful. But then she’d been on the path. _When it becomes a problem._ Vivienne’s words, like an elbow to the ribs.

Marjolaine drugged her, once. An Orlesian delicacy with a ten-word name—the Fereldans opted just to call it _honey-sweet_ and be done with it. They disguised themselves as scullery maids to infiltrate a noble’s house. He’d won a diamond bracelet from one of Marjolaine’s clients and the loser paid handsomely for them to retrieve the item. The job went sour, half his family dead and the diamond bracelet nowhere to be found.

Most jobs went sour in some way. But the client caught up with them on the lam, made them answer questions at sword point, and Marjolaine slipped her a vial of it before she was pulled alone into the room. Leliana drank without question. Marjolaine didn’t even have to tell her to do so.

Honey-sweet made sleep dreamless and waking memory fade. Sitting in front of her interrogator, Leliana could recall nothing but shades of what happened. It had been night, yes. The torches were lit. There was a severed hand, and remembering it made her eyes swim with tears, and all her focus evaporate, until her captors tossed her aside.

_I don’t like looking at you._

She spent the afternoon signing orders. More agents in the Western Approach, infiltrators in Minrathous. Griffon Wing Keep already crawled with her snakes; she sent a few south, to comb through the ruins of the Emprise du Lion and find any hideouts they’d missed.

Adaar planned on leaving for the Emerald Graves in the morning. Cassandra and Solas would accompany her. Perhaps Varric, unless he could wheedle out of it. Leliana could remember when there were once more of them in the Inner Circle, but most had already parted. The Iron Bull and his Chargers were technically still on the payroll, but didn’t like quartering at Skyhold. Dorian had made it for two months before she sent him packing back north. Morrigan, after Adaar had let Celene fall to Corypheus at Halamshiral, had refused to come to Skyhold, and hadn’t spoken once to Leliana. She preferred to deal with Josephine.

Vivienne deigned to stay, although she spent most of her time writing letters, gently turning the tides of Thedas. Adaar had spent nights drinking at Blackwall’s side, and days fighting at his back, and hours with her tongue down his throat in her private library, but sent him north to Weisshaupt without hesitation at his betrayal. (Leliana knew she had wept into the night, noticed a particular roughness in her voice the next morning at the war table.)

Fat, cut from the meat.

Leliana still kept in contact with Sera—short, fascinating notes filled with illustration. She sent her diamond-hard caltrops, night vanishing arrows, and a rugged point of amethyst that glowed softly when she held it in her hand. She didn’t think the Red Jenny would last long in Adaar’s world, but their riotous spirit, the utter _joy_ they took in chaos, made it easy to send them a few hundred gold now and then, talismans for luck, weapons for sparkle and cut.

One last letter, quickly scribbled in a cypher for Havar below. _I want the truth: why was she bound up?_ Her favorite raven, a nimble creature half a wingspan shorter than the rest, stood perfectly still as she bound the note to her leg. She called her Pin. Small and quick.

Pin returned within the hour, bearing a snatch of parchment in Havar’s meticulous script.

_Nothing suspicious. She’s healing at a pace—for all the lyrium and healing potions I give her, she ought to be. I make her drink them like water. But she’s not strong enough to keep herself upright all the time. And it’s to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself._

A space. She could picture Havar tapping her chin with her quill.

_We work one day, rest and wrap the next. When she falls asleep, she quakes something awful. Like her soul’s trying to leave her body. She broke her ankle again that way. I don’t believe in wasting good work—do you?_

Fair enough. She tossed the note into the fire.

Leliana never dreamed. That night, in her sleep, memories unspooled themselves in rich blue hues.

_Three hours past midnight in the Undercroft. Dagna only slept for four hours at a time, rising an hour before the cock crowed, which left Leliana no time. She had to view the visions from the shaperate crystal alone._

_A lie. The visions were inconsequential. She wanted to see—what the crystal would do._

_Floating dormant on the desk as she walked down the stone steps to Adaar and Dagna, remarking on documents she found—and then it blistered to life, clouds of lyrium-blue faces, shadows made flesh._

_Coincidence, but for the way her heart started. She saw Corypheus in the flesh at Haven and it hadn’t made her twist, as though an invisible hand tugged all the strings making up her spine at once. She’d barely been able to speak until the vision faded._

_A coincidence, surely. Surely. But it must be tested._

_The word reverberates to the rhythm of her breathing. Surely. She steps down the staircase once more. Surely. Leliana has never batted an eye at magic—but perhaps the strange workings of the dwarves had an adverse effect. Surely, an explanation. Surely—-_

_There was the blue crystal, humming in its cage. Dagna said it ran out of energy, used up all its power—but when she stepped too close, it erupted. Instantly charged by lightning. Shivers crawl across her skin, like cold, like fire, and the deep shadows of its memory blossom._

_A face, knitted in worried defiance, stared straight through her. Leliana froze, an instinct old as time, forgetting Calpernia was only a shadow until Corypheus slid through her like a ghost._

_Leliana stood inside him as they bicker. Calpernia’s head tilted up and she looked him squarely in the eye, her elegantly gloved hands crossed across her body._ Do you have wards against possession? The power will draw demons for miles. _The skepticism struck Leliana earlier in the day—she focused on the line of her mouth, how she betrayed nothing even as she questioned one with the power to give life, or take it._

Do not worry. _How gravelly his voice was, like the rumble of stone. The sharp line of Calpernia’s lips never eased, even as she nodded her head. One of her tells. Her mouth couldn’t lie._

_When the shadows faded back into the crystal, static lingered on Leliana’s skin for hours._

In the morning, when she woke from her usual piecemeal sleep, Leliana broke the ice in her water basin for washing. When she looked up into her mirror, a neat frame of clear glass with thread-thin feathers etched into the wood, her face had vanished.

~~~

Anger never made an appearance with Leliana. Amateur. Fuel, perhaps, but not action, and certainly never revealed. She suspected anger was what inspired the Maker to begin turning the great gears of the world. Love only comforted. Anger lit fires.

 _I don’t like looking at you._ Fixed, and so quickly.

Parts of the journey down went dark. It bothered her less and less with each step. The destination was no mystery, only the means. And means never posed a problem for Leliana.

Josephine liked to describe her face as porcelain, a lovingly unbreakable veneer. _Even when the plate shatters, you know the pieces for the masterpiece they once were,_ she told her, after they’d been up all night preparing for Inquisition forces to leave Adamant. _You pick up each one and sigh for the bone china. I could find you in Moritalitasi robes or dressed in ashcloth and mud and still know exactly who you are._

Electricity buzzed beneath her skin. Static, singing and lingering. Her own stupidity floored her. A mage worthy of Corypheus’ mentorship, a singular protege from the land where protege could be bought by the pound. And Leliana had forgotten her power. Forgotten mages did not need hands, or feet, or working bones to make their great gifts known.

A branch scratched her cheek; she did not notice it. Leliana made no habit of distrusting mages. Hypocritical, to hate the moon for rising. They only did as they were born to do. But she had been deceived.

“You can afford to leave me alone for a moment,” came a haughty snap, just as Havar’s home came into view down the wooded path. It was well-hidden in the glen, but sound traveled far in the quiet of the mountain. Squinting, she saw Calpernia, propped up in a chair, a blanket over her lap and another wrapped around her shoulders. She sat with her eyes closed, one arm bound across her chest in a sling. Her exhaustion was apparent—they’d been practicing standing. She recalled what Havar said about alternating days—one bound in comfrey and poultices, and the other spent working the muscles tirelessly. Today had obviously been the latter.

The other arm lay limp across her lap, rough bandage obscuring her skin from shoulder to wrist. Her hand, stiff in the cold, opened and closed into a fist. Over and over. Praciting.

Leliana made her steps absolutely silent as she slunk closer. She would be quiet. She would not thunder into the clearing like a mad horse.

Havar stitched leather beside her, looking unperturbed as stone.

“I suppose the Avaar all live in the same hovel,” Calpernia continued, “and grow up entirely without privacy.”

“When you’ve got your legs back, you can walk as far as you want in any direction you please.” Havar made no attempt to continue the conversation. _You can’t even stand on your own yet, you fool,_ went unsaid.

“Why do the Avvar serve the Inquisition?” Calpernia, again. She wanted to talk, Leliana noted, at any cost.

Havar shrugged. “We owe a life debt to the Inquisitor. She saved our tribes from being overrun by demons in the early days of the war.”

Her brow furrowed. When in thought, there was no hiding the emotions flickering across her face, as though her whole mind was set to the task of thinking, and hang the rest. “That’s no reason for her to keep you under her thumb.”

“Please, _callieach._ ” Havar drew the thread through the leather once more. “Nobody can yoke the Avvar.”

“For now.” A pause, steep and sharp. The look on her face darkened. “You did choose this.” When Havar did not answer, she said, “I suppose the promise of being elevated from _cave-dweller_ to _chattel_ is—“

A brief pause, not unlike a held breath of air when drawing a bow, before Havar reached out and snatched Calpernia by the chin. Her touch turned her head—firm, not bruising. Calpernia’s eyes flashed.

“Don’t speak to me that way,” Havar said, serene and deadly. She sounded peaceful as one of the Frostbacks’ higher peaks, the ones that split the clouds on first days of spring.

“I only meant—”

“To set me free, like a pheasant caught in a net.” The hard edge of amusement in Havar’s voice did the dismissing for her. She released Calpernia. “It’s not my arse you should be worrying about, Tevinter.”

Calpernia’s face went milk-sour, and then Leliana came out from the forest. Havar made no attempt to hide her hand. She released Calpernia and stood up.

“Pillar,” she greeted, with only a touch of her usual warmth. “I’ve got traps to check, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Leliana and nodded, and Havar went into the house to grab her hunting knife and arrows. She had only just pulled down her hood when Calpernia sighed, and leaned her head back against the house.

“I’ve never seen anyone test Havar’s patience.”

Calpernia made a disdainful noise. “I—” she began, and then stopped abruptly. The regret flashed across her face quickly. “Blood from a stone,” she finally said. Her face was drawn with tiredness. They’d been out here for hours, and it showed.

Havar came out and turned into the woods without a sound, other than her boots softly _thumping_ on the wet and mossy ground. Leliana fell silent. Waiting. The tension turned between them like a knot being pulled tight. Havar’s back faded from view, and then her sounds did.

Silence to prepare the way, then Leliana pressed a blade against the curve of Calpernia’s throat, quick as lightning.

Calpernia blinked once, twice, three times. Her body did not tense. Leliana could see the supreme effort it took to remain lax against the dagger. She merely looked at her as though the evening’s entertainment was far less compelling than expected. Calpernia might have done well in the Game, if only she possessed a better instinct for winning.

“Hardly a day,” she said with attempted wryness. “No time to really offend anyone, even if I tried. How—”

Leliana pressed the blade against skin, the angle careful not to cut. Pressed it deep enough to flesh that Calpernia swallowed uncomfortably against it, and the slide of her muscles made the dagger tremble. It caught the stark early-spring light peeking through the trees. Calpernia’s eyes dilated. For an instant, Leliana thought she could feel the quickening of her heartbeat, like a rabbit’s.

“What did you do to me?” When she spoke, her own voice sounded far away.

Calpernia’s nostrils flared. “ _Do_ to you? Nightingale, I can’t stumble to the chamberpot without someone hauling me there and back again.” If she could have pointed her pretty nose any farther skyward without skinning her own neck, she would have.

But her mouth. It twisted at the corner, an uncomfortable stubbornness. Leliana leaned her weight against the handle, and a droplet of blood danced at the edge.

“You’ll kill a woman who can’t stand?” she asked.

“I’ll kill anyone who tries to twist my life.” _You’re hardly the first._ The static sung in the tips of her fingers, the harder she gripped the knife. But this—the hovel, the lines of the tall mountain trees, the grey-blue glint of the knife, Calpernia’s knife—came in sharper relief than anything had in days.

“I can’t—”

“Stop telling me what you can’t do.” Another little swell of blood. This one trailed down her neck. “I heard you well enough. _I don’t like looking at you._ You don’t need to wiggle your fingers to bring me to heel.” Magebane, Leliana thought. Just enough to keep her cowed and useful. Havar wouldn’t like it, even for an enemy, but a few choice reminders of her kinsmen slain by Corypheus’ men would seal her agreement.

But these words struck Calpernia, a look of recognition flashing across her face. It made the pit of Leliana’s stomach sink. Another tell. She couldn’t control her face upon discovery, no matter how quickly it passed. Only amateurs assumed all tells were for lying. When you spent so much time engaged in deception, those little hints of truth become grossly obvious.

But she gritted her teeth, didn’t ease on the dagger, finding some poisonous barb to spit in her face, when Calpernia said, in an even voice, a puff of white escaping from between her lips, “What happened?”

“I can’t see my face.” Leliana didn’t recognize the sound of her own voice. How rough it was. “In the mirror. I’ve disappeared.”

A crease formed between her pale brows, and Leliana felt her slow intake of breath. “The first time,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

“How could you know?” snapped Leliana. A clear confession of guilt. She’d been wrong. Certainly not above admitting an incorrect judgment, even after all these years—

But Calpernia’s face softened into a strange, unreadable look. It made the world tilt for the first time since she’d stormed into the clearing. An imbalance lingering beneath her feet. The corner of Calpernia’s mouth curved into a small, wry smirk, and she said, “You do seem like the kind of woman who looks in the mirror every morning.”

The look never changed, never faded, even as Leliana slowly pulled the dagger away from her neck. It took a long time, as though her body didn’t remember how to stand down. But it never left her hand. The silence between them stretched, long and foreign. Leilana was accustomed to crafting quiet, not being the cause of it. There was nothing she could say.

Calpernia cleared her throat. “She keeps one inside.” She made no move to wipe away the trickle of blood, as though she’d forgotten about it already. “If you’re curious.”

Irritation flared, sudden and hot, on the back of her neck. “What?”

“A mirror, Nightingale.”

The static left her fingers once she’d pulled the knife away. It still rumbled in her, but deep. An untouchable place. A dull headache began behind her ear.

The hand in Calpernia’s lap opened, an offer she could take or leave. “Let’s see,” she said simply. “Or take your knife and go back up the mountain.” _With nothing._ “I don’t care.”

In the days to come, Leliana would tell herself that when she found herself at Havar’s workstation, carefully lifting a mirror from under a sack of musty embrium leaves, she didn’t know how she got there. That she found herself sifting through bowls and alchemical ingredients, then the mirror was in her hands. As though she’d always known just where it was. One of her moments when she found herself somewhere else.

But the truth was from the moment she stood, and opened Havar’s door, and walked to the west wall of the house, skirting by the warm fire, to the table sitting under a bright window—she knew precisely where she was going, and what she held.

The mirror was cheap. A handle flecked with rust and the gilt-gold finish scratched away years and many owners. She knelt next to Calpernia’s chair, and was tall enough their heads were level.

“If you bewitch—” Leliana said, although it was probably unnecessary.

“A poor use of my energy, when kittens have better legs than I do.”

When she leaned close, Calpernia smelled like drying sweat, and old herbs. Havar had worked her all morning, and would do more when she returned. To cast would be careless. Her unbandaged hand began its squeeze and release. A line of pockmarked dots scarred her palm, travelling over the hill of her thumb and down her wrist, until they faded into the soft skin.

Leliana found herself counting them, like steps off a cliff. And by the end, she could hold up the mirror. A slow, painstaking movement, until it caught her face—

Not a face. Bone-white shadows, rippling in the air. She caught the edge of her jaw, sharp as a knife, inked by grey. She could see the house behind her, but whatever presence was there yawned and shuddered, caught by the mirror’s frame and unable to move. This morning in her room, they were still as stone.

Leliana’s arm jerked, to toss the mirror away, but then—a hand, weak and unpresumptuous, wrapped two fingers and a thumb at the bottom of the handle, steadying it.

“A moment more.” Calpernia considered the mirror with unabashed thoughtfulness. No pity. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t yank the mirror out of her hand, toss it to the ground like a hot brand. “What did you do,” she murmured, “when you saw this?”

“I don’t remember.” Her own voice, even and carefully folded as paper. In truth, she had grabbed the edge of the end table, a scream choking in her throat, garrotted by her own control.

The shadows shuddered again, with pale blue tinge. The precise color of the corner of a dead man’s mouth after he’d been dead for four days. A purpled crease of death and bile. She could not stop watching how they moved, unsteady and—

She said, as though needing to prove her alarm, “They were—still, this morning, in my room.” The ripple, like the surface of water, was there. But not…

“You’re shaking,” Calpernia said clinically, as though remarking on the weather. “It’s a reflection.” A long pause. Leliana refused to acknowledge any of it.

“Turn your head to the side a little,” bade Calpernia. “Watch what it does.”

She turned her chin to the left. One of the blue lines shimmered as it caught the sun, like smoke made flesh. It followed her. She did it again, and again, and the two of them watched.

“Why is this happening?” Leliana asked, careful to keep any careless hopelessness out of her voice.

“Do you want an honest answer?”

“I certainly don’t want a coy one. Say you don’t know.” Flat and impatient.

“Because, Nightingale,” Calpernia answered, arching her eyebrow, “I don’t think you’re quite real.”


	2. her favorite

Night. Leliana sat in the copper tub, suds sticking to her shoulders, water still steaming. Her fingers had already pruned, and she studied the ridges.

When she returned from Havar’s home, she lingered for a moment in the Great Hall, eyeing Vivienne’s loft and contemplating a visit. More than an inconvenience. This was the cue. And yet. Vivienne forfeited her opportunity to be honest with her about what was happening—and either she didn’t know, or chose a small mercy instead. Kindness. Leliana couldn’t fault her for it, but nor could she return to darken her doorway.

As she climbed the stairs to her rookery, she saw the hallway leading to Josephine’s room and paused. What would she say, if she knocked upon her door? _I am either dying, or disappearing, or both, and I don’t know why._ It would send her into hysterics. _I’m considering help from Corypheus’ general. Yes, the one who burned Haven to the ground, and murdered people you knew, loved._

Josephine came to Leliana with her grievances—in the early days of the Inquisition, when Adaar couldn’t be bothered to use diplomacy as a handkerchief for her nose, they spent long nights in front of the fire, with wine, or food, or both, and plotted. Josephine hungered for victory, but her true love was _challenge._ Adaar would understand her worth soon, she was sure, and a long slog made it all the sweeter.

But years had passed, and Adaar never shifted in her stance. What’s more, she found Leliana’s way of doing things extremely preferable. She appreciated Cullen’s dog-loyalty and way with the troops, his uniquely sweet way of following orders (Leliana knew he even began to take lyrium again at her bequest—it made him stronger, better, and ruthless), but Leliana could make Adaar’s desires real, with minimal fuss. Her favorite.

And as Adaar turned to this way more and more—a knife in the dark, a threat of assassins, blood on the walls as a message to all—Josephine was left without a voice at the table. In fact, she was rarely asked to come any longer.

She would leave. Leliana knew it. The moment Corypheus was defeated, she would spirit herself from Skyhold without a trace, other than an impeccably penned resignation letter left on her desk. Find a new post, a better one in Antiva’s courts, or at Celene’s side again. A thousand doors opened to her now.

The point was, Leliana did not come to Josephine with aches and pains, and Josephine hadn’t found Leliana for some time. She couldn’t blame her. How difficult, to see your efforts eschewed over and over in favor of violence. And so she let her be.

Leliana dotted the surface of the water with oil, elderflower and lavender from Orlais, and sank down until just her nose peered above.

 _Tell me what’s happening_ , Leliana demanded, her grip on her dagger tightening.

At that, Calpernia had shrugged. Almost embarassed. _Now,_ that _I don’t quite know,_ she admitted. There was the sound of twigs crunching in the distance. Soon they’d no longer be alone.

 _Then what use are you?_ she snapped.

 _I have a hypothesis,_ Calpernia said simply. _Come back and speak to me, if you wish._ Leliana heard Havar’s unmistakeable gait trudge closer and closer. _Or don’t. I will rot here either way._

Leliana left wordlessly as soon as Havar appeared. No need to explain herself to Calpernia, and Havar hardly minded how she came and went. After crossing the tree line, she’d paused when a snatch of conversation made it to her ears.

 _What happened to your neck?_ asked Havar, puzzled.

 _I scratched myself._ A long pause. _Havar. I’ve something to say._

Havar gave a sigh. Now Leliana turned, watched her hang a brace of hares from a hook outside the house. _I don’t care much for how you feel about it,_ she said. _Apologies don’t fill the belly._

 _Very well._ Calpernia reached up and wiped the blood away from her neck with her thumb. _Should we begin?_

Havar nodded, and helped pull her blanket away. She was wearing a rough shift of brown linen, the collar stained with dried sweat. Woolen leggings, with one booted foot and the other wrapped in bandages. Her matted hair was been bound up again.

 _We’re going on three,_ Havar said, leaning down next to her. She held out her arms, strong as stone, and Calpernia grabbed her shoulder with her good hand.

 _Ready,_ she said _._

_One. Two. Three._

A moment of precarious rocking, heavy grunts and pants from Calpernia, and then she stood, wobbling, on one foot. She pressed her other toe into the mud for balance, clutching Havar tight enough to rip the shirt she wore. A handful of her ratty, cornsilk hair fell loose from its knot. It hung down her neck in a matted clump. Her teeth bared, breath whistling in and out between the gap.

How pathetic. A certain type of regret turned her stomach, one that echoed _death spares one from humiliation._ What a mistake, to let someone live a broken half-life, even if she might prove useful. (Whether that was for the Inquisition or for Leliana’s own sake was for fate to decide.) She watched Calpernia half-hunch, like a beggar woman in the street, barely able to keep her balance. Her strength for standing would be a moment at most. And then she would fall, crumble downwards until Havar caught her. She—

 _Steady,_ commanded Havar. Calpernia closed her eyes, tightened her shoulders, even as her legs trembled, and straightened. For an entire breath, she stood upright as an arrow, nocked and pointed towards the sky.

~~~ Leliana came in the afternoon, scissors and comb in her pocket. Havar squeezed the pulp from fat leaves of elfroot into a pot on the fire—when the gunk hit the bottom it steamed up, a mint-sharp scent raking, then soothing, the inside of her nose. She waved a limp handful of green leaves in greeting and went back to her work. Havar supplied Leliana’s agents with potions and antidotes of all kinds, old standards every agent in her employ needed and new ones for creativity’s sake—a hobby of sorts.

Calpernia lay on her pallet, motionless as the dead except for the slight rise and fall of her shoulders. She wore a rough shift as a nightdress, her blanket tucked up under her arms. But she smelled of wet herbs, sodden and nearly rotted. More of Havar’s poultices.

Leliana knelt by her head, retreived the shears from her pocket and stared down at knotted blond hair.

“I know what you’re thinking, Pillar.” Havar, from the hearth. “I tried myself, but she said no. I wouldn’t.”

She supposed as much. “It’s disgusting.” Worse than that, it was below her. But she imagined Calpernia was vain. A common attribute for those who loved control. Even in the dim shaperate crystal her hair was bound impeccably to her head, not a strand out of place. Havar shrugged. “I don’t disagree,” she said. “But—”

Leliana leaned forward, twisted some of the matted locks between her fingers, and cut with a defiant snip. Close to the scalp. The knots twisted themselves up so high little could be saved. It would grow back.

Quick work, clean and easy. Leliana made sure to take care. No nicks, no stray hairs. Only when she tried to adjust Calpernia’s head, to trim the other side, everything fell to pieces.

Her eyes snapped open—wide and brown and full of instinct—and she cast a barrier. Merely child’s play, a shadow of what she could do at full strength, but it pushed Leliana flat onto her back. She sprung up, shears in hand, but Calpernia’s hand reached out, glowing with soft fire.

Barely a handful of candle flames carried in her splint arm, heavy and she already wobbled with the effort of extension. Her better hand groped along her head, horror flashing across her face.

Leliana said, even as fresh snow, “You look monstrous.”

“It should hardly matter. This is how you repay—” Calpernia bit down on the word kindness, and said, “ _advice._ ”

The accusation made her hackles rise. “Perhaps I didn’t like looking at you,” she replied, after a long, cold, pause.

A milder woman would have gasped; Calpernia’s face twisted, the scar across her nose wrinkling. “No,” she sneered. “You can’t stand being in debt. Time to remind me of my place. Come to ask for help—”

“I don’t ask.” Leliana balanced precariously on her knees, and counted each dagger she knew she hid on her body. There were twelve in all, counting the little gold one hanging between her breasts under her mail. A gift from Josephine. She felt her heart beat against it. The flames, no matter how badly Calpernia’s arm trembled, glowed brighter. “You live at the pleasure of the Inquisition.”

“Only because someone decided to pull me from a river and not _let me die._ ” Three glass jars on Havar’s mantle broke, one right after the other, their contents spilling over the wood and onto the floor. “I live at no one’s pleasure, Nightingale—don’t touch me.”

Leliana had leaned forward, ever so slightly, and now froze in place. Calpernia’s hand arm trembled so badly she could hardly hold it up. She pulled it back her chest, cradling it with her good hand, and then the fire leapt up in a high arc.

For a moment, Leliana was sure she meant to burn down the hovel, to burn herself inside it like Andraste at the stake. Instead the flames circled about her head, a smooth, lazy halo. The smell of burnt hair stung the inside of her nose, and then all Calpernia’s hair was gone. Little ashes dotted her shoulders, and the smooth, pale dip of her clavicles. All that was left was soft, light-colored fuzz. The flames came a little close behind her ear, left an angry red burn. Leliana wanted to press her thumb against it, hear whatever sound she’d make.

But she curled her hand around her shears again. Calpernia leaned back against the wall, her head bent. She looked older, without her hair, and healthier, now that she wasn’t a matted dog curled on a bed in Havar’s house. Havar had watched the proceedings from the corner of her eye, never lifting a finger to help Leliana. Well. She did warn her.

“Perhaps if you didn’t live at someone else’s pleasure,” Calpernia muttered lowly, shoulders sagged with the weariness of doing such precise magic, “you’d realize no one bears it willingly.”

“Is that what’s happening to me?” demanded Leliana, ignoring the slight.

“No, that’s merely your life.” Calpernia pulled the blanket closer around her. “Your—condition is entirely different.”

And then she went silent as stone, her lips pressing absolutely shut. Rage made Calpernia pale and cold as ice. Precise as a knife blade, and well aware of her advantage.

Leliana took care to sigh and put the shears away. “I saw you standing with Havar yesterday,” she said. “Your hair looked—” Like a sick dog’s coat. Mangy as a rat. Too heavy for her neck. “Distracting. I thought—”

“If you touch me again without my permission, I’ll set your eyelashes on fire,” Calpernia said. “I don’t care how many knives you hold to my throat. I’ll make your skin drip like candlewax.”

“Fine.” As close to an apology as she would ever come, and so close to an off-color joke she almost smiled. The pause was brief, clearing the violence between them like dirty dishes from a table. Business, now. They both understood it.

“Now.” Calpernia, perfectly cordial. “You’ll need to carry me to the table. I can’t do this half-falling over.”

She blinked. Surprised, for once. “Havar—”

“Havar is _busy._ ” Indeed, Havar was now totally immersed in making notes at her workstation, squeezing the pulp from a thistle into a mortar and scribbling in pen with her other hand. The look in her eyes was knife-pointed and—perhaps a little victorious. “The table, Nightingale.”

Leliana didn’t know the proper way to carry a wounded person (nor did she care), but she found herself abruptly at Calpernia’s side, one arm wrapping around her shoulders without a word of warning.

Lifting Calpernia from the pallet bore more resemblance to trying to carry too much firewood at once than anything else. She hissed when Leliana slid one arm under her knees and jolted up; her good arm wrapped around her neck on instinct, too tight. She was all angles and birdbones, too light for a person and still awkwardly heavy after a few steps. Calpernia was unaccustomed to being carried, or in pain, or both, and froze sharply at being handled so. Her hand tangled in Leliana’s hood, gripping for purchase.

Leliana did not _dump_ her in the chair, but the landing was far from light. Calpernia yanked her blanket around her, ruffled as a kicked rooster. (She’d seen enough of them outside Lothering’s chantry to spot a match when she saw it.)

“Here you are,” she said, sitting across the table, folding one leg over the other. “Perhaps I can fetch you grapes, wine, _petit fours._ ”

Calpernia slowly rolled her neck, sharp tip of her chin angling up. She reached her hand forward and let it rest upon the table. Leliana waited for it to begin its usual open-and-shut routine, but it lay still.

Her eyes caught the line of dotted scars, the stairway winding down the hill of her palm. She counted each one, and then did it again.

“I want a boon from you,” she said. Before Leliana could furrow her brow, or even tilt her head in amusement, she continued. “Not from Nightingale, emissary of the Inquisition. From you, yourself. The person asking for my help.” She raised an eyebrow. “Just one.”

Leliana let out a dry _ha._ “What makes you—”

“There are a hundred other mages at your disposal.” Calpernia cut her off, sharp as a branch cracked under a boot. “Go to them instead. We can spend an hour tallying the losses between us or you can owe me a boon and we’ll continue. I don’t follow orders anymore.” Her nostrils flared slightly. “I participate in transactions.”

Her directness made an impression on Leliana, who found herself conceding with a single nod. A promise was only that. She would worry about it later.

“This—episode, with the mirror.” Calpernia frowned. “It’s not the first one, is it?”

Not at all. And Leliana, without much prompting, listed the rest of the facts. Headaches. The way her vision blurred and sharpened from moment to moment. And forgetting. Forgetting pieces of the past, slipping away into shadow. Forgetting how her feet led her from one place to—

Calpernia held up her good hand to pause her. “Your memory falters?” she asked, curious.

“Yes.” She shrugged. “It’s been happening a long time.” A delicate pause. “Years.”

The scrap of some bright idea flashed behind Calpernia’s eyes. It made Leliana wary, and lifted an inch of the heavy weight from her heart. An idea was a beginning. She watched her carefully lift her arm, still bound with its splint, and laid it on the table. The hand, covered with bandages, flexed and opened. Stiff as its mate. Leliana wondered how. Did she break her hands in her fall? Unlikely, for both—

“May I have your hand?” Calpernia beckoned, interrupting her thoughts.

“You couldn’t possibly afford it,” was Leliana’s reply, and the response made Calpernia purse her lips. Whether to quash a smile or a scowl, she couldn’t say.

“It’s not necessary,” she said, but before she could move her arm back into her lap, Leliana let her hand rest open on the table. Calpernia took it, pulled it back so she could lean over the table and examine it with the other, prodding her palm.

When was the last time someone touched her hand? Josephine, perhaps, in an imploring squeeze—

Calpernia remarked, “Your skin is very cold,” and drew her fingertip down the palm. They were close to the fire, and little beads of sweat prickled along her hairline. Finally she looked up at Leliana and wrinkled her nose.

“I suppose it’s too much to ask for a pin,” she said. When Leliana soured, she sighed dramatically. “Only to test your nerves. Your reflexes.”

“My reflexes are not in question.”

Calpernia’s look defined long suffering. _Will you do this every step of the way?_ as plain as day. “It’s no problem,” she said, and Leliana felt the stiff fingers from her bad arm flex under the weight of her hand uncomfortably.

She found herself drawing the thin gold chain out from around her neck, the little dagger swinging. The hilt held a tiny ruby— _your birthstone_ , Josephine had told her, even though Leliana had no idea when she was born. The scabbard slid off with a flick of her finger, and Calpernia plucked it graciously from the table after Leliana laid it down.

“Ah,” she said. “The Nightingale’s least dramatic knife.”

Calpernia tapped at Leliana’s wrist, the smooth tendons there, and the soft landscapes of her palm. The meaty flesh at the root of her thumb. The calloused pillows before each finger—Leliana could scarcely feel the poke. The dagger really was not much bigger than a pin. It made a pen-knife look like one of Adaar’s mighty battleaxes—

Calpernia jabbed it into the soft flesh of a fingertip, and at the first well of blood, ducked her head and licked.

It—

She—

Leliana froze, her mind gone white with rage, surprise, _disbelief._ Her hand jerked, but Calpernia’s clumsy fingers held it still. They trembled a little with the effort.

“There,” she said, as satisfied as a cat. “ _Now_ we’re even.”

She jerked her fist to her chest, her other hand sliding along her waist for the obsidian dagger nestled there. But Calpernia only tilted her head, the little golden dagger still in her fingers. “Havar?” she called casually. “You don’t mind a bit of magic, do you?”

Havar made a noncommittal noise, still deep in her work (or ignoring them on purpose, Leliana was sure), and Calpernia made a neat cut in the pad of her own thumb. Blood pooled and then took to the air like a handful of carelessly tossed jewels.

What happened next spun lightning-quick. The red began to whirl, twisting on a crazed spindle and growing. It thrummed with a heartbeat of its own. She felt the music of it in the balls of her feet. The light of the fire was no longer visible as it drew around them, a curtain. Calpernia splayed both hands open on the table, slowly drawing them apart in some kind of ritual. The sound pounded in Leliana’s ears. The dagger was in her hand—Calpernia wasn’t even looking at her—was it over—was it happening here, of all places, ten feet away from where one of her agents was too preoccupied to notice she was dying—

The red slid between them with a hundred tributaries, roaring and stretching to the ceiling, and traces of fire danced on Calpernia’s shoulders, along her bony clavicles and the gruesome burlap getup hanging off her body. Her eyes flashed, brilliant and brown, and squeezing the hilt of the dagger, Leliana pulled back her arm and struck—

It stopped. All of it stopped. The drumbeat softened, steadied. Leliana opened her eyes, not knowing she closed them. They sat, surrounded by red. It flowed about them soft as seafoam, rising over their heads in a smooth dome. The whispering rush and sigh of waves, lit by dim light. It cast Calpernia’s face and hands in deep pink shadows.

She looked down. Her dagger was buried hilt-deep in the table, perfectly between Calpernia’s middle and ring fingers.

“You’re right,” Calpernia said. Her dry amusement hid whatever anxiety built there, but didn’t mask—was she _impressed_ , Leliana asked herself, amazed. “Your reflexes certainly aren’t in question.”

Leliana pulled the dagger out of the wood, but did not let it go. She looked up. They rested at the bottom of a red ocean, water spilling and circling around them in constant revolution, and her grip tightened.

But it was quiet here. The red cupped them like a pair of hands, cradled away from the world. She stared up into it, fascinated.

“This is my blood,” said Calpernia smoothly. “I—it’s an spell my old master invented, to see the tiniest cracks in his artifacts, with a little more—effort.” A long pause, before she hastily added, “I didn’t think it would work.”

“Why—”

“It’s red, it flows, it clots.” she continued, as though Leliana hadn’t spoken. “Nothing strange about that. But—” Light flickered across the surface at random, faded blue and purple back into the red where it disappeared. They sparked and dove beneath the surface, but never faded. Little veins of power.

Calpernia reached out with her good hand, traced a fingernail into the surf. “That’s mana. It makes me a mage. Connects me to the Fade. The south and all their religious nonsense wants you to believe it comes from the soul. But it’s here, in the thing that makes us live and breathe every day.”

She sounded wistful, like she was reciting a poem from an old tome. Perhaps she was. Leliana found herself reaching out, her fingers parting the flow. It streamed around her fingertips, the little scatterings of light winding away, leaving her hand untouched.

“How clean,” she said dryly. “I don’t even need lye.”

Calpernia laughed—short, rusty, and quickly squelched under her tongue. The sound made Leliana’s head turn. After a moment of silence, she waved her on. _Talk._

“Lyrium,” she said carefully, “feeds mana, reacts with it. Too much and it’ll blister a mage out of her mind and her skin. When they touch, it sparks.”

Leliana said, with a little familiarity, “The color. The white-blue.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, something died between her lungs, a deep pit of dread emerging from nowhere. Calpernia didn’t seem to notice. “Yes,” she agreed. “Some scholars think they’re nearly the same, or were, once upon a time. It’s not quite right, I don’t think, but it’s the right _idea.”_ She paused. “I’ve become more familiar with the study of lyrium. Had to be, with—Corypheus’ ambitions.”

Leliana wondered if she’d nearly said _the Elder One_ , and caught herself just as the last moment. The sinking feeling threatened to swallow her heart. “Get to the point.”

“Mages react to lyrium,” she said. “It strung my tongue.”

 _It. It. My tongue._ Like listening to a different language, and catching a single word of familiarity.

Leliana said nothing. Calpernia regarded her with her unreadable brown eyes. She let the moment sit. The air was warm here, within the sphere. Warm enough to sleep, if she closed her eyes, and let go long enough to dream. She wondered how long they could linger here, before being dumped into whatever new strangeness. And then Calpernia spoke.

“Just a prick,” she said. “That’s all it takes.” Her little smirk reappeared. “I assume you’ve endured worse.”

Leliana’s mouth was dry as bone as she held out the pad of her finger, offered to the tiny blade. “Nothing worth talking about or repeating.”

A smile flickered across Calpernia’s face as she twiddled the little gold dagger in her hands. “I didn’t think you’d let me explain the difference between _blood magic_ and _magic to do with blood_ ,” she said suddenly.

As close to an apology as she might get. Leliana flexed her finger. _Get on with it,_ she willed, and at the dart of the dagger’s tiny point, all the world changed.

No muscle-deep thrum of life, pounding ventricles, a sprinting river flowing across the body. No rising tide, blood regenerating itself endlessly year after year in its own poetry. The endless sound, nudging them forward towards survival, was gone.

Leliana’s blood _drifted,_ powder-thin snowflakes made of blue-white sapphires. Whirling and spinning with a faint tinkle. It moved, just as Calpernia’s did, in waves. It encapsulated them within the heart of a blizzard, drifts of snow whirling around them.

“Nightingale,” said Calpernia, and she sounded miles away. She reached out her fingers, and just before she touched the wall, she glanced at Leliana. Asking for _permission._ When Leliana nodded, and she prodded the swirl with a fingertip, it danced blue around her fingertip, little stars in orbit, before being pulled back into the fray.

“I don’t bleed _blue_ ,” she said stubbornly, nose wrinkling.

“I’m a mage, doing magic,” Calpernia said slowly, as though Leliana was just learning how to connect stars into constellations. “It’s reacting, I think.”

It took a long time for Leliana to touch her own blood, the feathery down surrounding them. Crackles of gold escaped from between her fingers. Not bright enough for lightning. The gold streaked from her touch, a paintbrush dipped into melted sovereigns. After a few revolutions it grew dull and burnished, and faded into the blue.

She didn’t speak. Beautiful, the stone-grey blue of snow when the sun set in winter. Calpernia closed her eyes. She was listening to the music it made. The wind, blowing through faraway chimes. When Calpernia spoke, the air frosted her breath.

“Is this what it sounds like inside you?” she asked, brushing the backs of her knuckles against the smooth wall of snow, letting the cerulean sparks part her fingers. “A song, all the time?”

Her mind struggled to fathom it. She’d never heard chimes instead of a heartbeat, this low flute music instead of her blood pounding in her ears. But none of it was unfamiliar.

Calpernia murmured, “It’s so still,” and closed her eyes again, listening. “And what’s a song, if you’re never without it?”

They fell silent after that. Leliana watched the flashes of golden thunder, muted and simple under the winds. She remembered watching storms fade under the trees when they’d no tents in the their quest to raise armies during the Blight. Sten, sniffing the humid air. Morrigan, eyes locked on the sky. Tracking the wind currents, or perhaps just trying to appear more in-tune with the summer storm for appearance’s sake. Admittedly a fetching look, mostly because she wasn’t trying. And as the thunderstorm rolled into the distance, lightning became only dim shadows on the fat, steel-colored clouds. This gold was the same. Constant, mesmerizing. Just out of reach.

When she was ready, she spoke. “You said I wasn’t real.”

Calpernia’s eyes opened. “Not as we know it, Nightingale.” Her voice held no sadness or pity. It was dry as bone, and full of wonder. “You’re as lyrium as the rivers of the Fade.”

~~~

Once she called the spell down, Calpernia could barely hold her head up for weariness. Leliana let her be and sidled over to the other side of the house where Havar worked for a chipped mug and a ladle of water from the bucket on the floor.

“You come down here a lot,” Havar muttered under her breath, equally blunt and curious. She was peeling a gnarled root with a paring knife the size of her thumb.

Leliana shrugged. “She’s of assistance right now.” A little of the water spilled over the rim, and dropped the ladle back in the bucket. “And I suppose…”

Havar rolled one of her shoulders. Expectant. “Mmm?”

“I don’t like waste,” she decided. “She’s no good if she rots.”

Her watery green eyes glanced up at her, just once. “Some men go mad as their bones heal. Too slow. But she’s fine.” A sand-colored piece of peel drifted to the floor. “She’s got a lot to think about.”

“With only you—”

Havar snorted. “With only me?” she repeated, with a shock of laughter that showed her teeth. “Nightingale, how many people do _you_ talk to in a day?”

When she turned back to the table, Calpernia slept like the dead, her head knocked back against the chair. The thought of lifting her up and laying her back down on the pallet herself was so strong she immediately turned from it, and left the house without another word.

She was calm. After all, it was an answer. No excuse for panic, or despair. She’d bled those from her body long ago. Less chains to bind her when a decision balanced on a knife’s edge. They made brief appearances in her life, from time to time (she dismissed her attempt to kill Calpernia at the table, and her knife pressed against her neck the day before immediately) but held no sway. _How? How?_ The question persisted uselessly.

Wrapped in Calpernia’s blood, the warmth and the aching thrum of life felt keen as memory. A dream. A place she hadn’t laid her head in some time—a visit. Rushing and receding waves, what she knew now to be the sound of the heart’s pump and squeeze, an old song.

Her own—snow drifts and the wind-thin flute song of a faraway voice—felt like home. Unsettling and cold, but hers. To see it unfurled around her twisted her stomach, but eventually she’d forgotten discomfort.

Not quite real. It explained everything, and nothing at all. Absurd enough to be nothing but a dream, put away for the evening. After all, the only person who could both see the truth of it and speak it to her face existed a mile down the mountain.

When she found herself at the rookery door, she attributed it to being lost in thought. Nevermind she never walked through Skyhold without marking each face she saw, and standing at the door, she could not recall how many doors she’d opened to get here, or if the torches in the hall were lit as she passed, or if the guards genuflected and said, _Evening, ma’am_ in their low-country Fereldan accents as they passed.

But the truth lingered in the back of her mind, cool as a hand on the back of her neck.

The ravens sputtered in their cages, fluttering their wide wings. A sack of mealworms rested near their mews, and when Leliana snaked a full palm of them through the unlatched door, they pecked as delicately as Orlesian nobles. A few nipped the skin, but she barely felt them. It reminded her of the little knife. The short jab. Calpernia’s tongue—

She hadn’t collected it back, her golden pendant and chain. Another amateur mistake. Havar would take it from her when she saw it on the table.

It did not bother her as much as it should, to picture Calpernia fiddling with it to will strength back into her fingers, the chain resting around her neck.

Her correspondence waited for her in a towering pile upon the table—first, a report from Charter with updates on new contracts and a better band of sailors for smuggling across the Waking Sea. Charter needed another lieutenant in Caer Bronach—the crossroads was a guild to rival the Carta in Kirkwall or any other underground network in Thedas. She’d thought it foolish at first—the fortress stuck out like a stone thumb. But under Leliana’s direction, Charter made it the crux of all knowledge passing in and out of the south. A thieves’ capital. A wonder, not unlike the Winter Palace or the Sun Dome in Cumberland. Surrounded by murky tides and the skeleton ruins of the old village, no one faint of heart dared venture near it. Only the worthy.

Next, various missives from her agents in the West and their attempted tracking of the Venatori. _They’re like smoke, but we’re never without a trail._

A note from Josephine, requesting one of Leliana’s better undercovers to accompany a minor prince from Antiva to Skyhold. _An attache for protection,_ she wrote. _I’ve come into a box of those lavender chocolates you like so much, if you’re willing—an adequate compromise, no?_

A quick update from the east: Grand Victoire resigned from her post, and her cousin Lord Firmin needed to be returned to his lands. They only needed to send two fingers before she recanted in a letter so brief Leliana was sure she sent it in a panic. Good. She needed quickness more than ever, now. The tides would change after the Inquisition defeated Corypheus. The immediacy of their power would diminish. Owing loyalty, and needing it for protection were two vastly different leashes.

Adaar’s letter rested at the bottom of the pile. When she picked it up, it occurred to her how quiet Skyhold was. The clock marked only an hour after dinner was typically served in the Great Hall, and the fortress was as hushed as the forest.

She broke the seal, and unfolded her orders. _Sister Leliana_ , they began, _what are you fucking around for?_

Not unexpected. Since the earliest days of the Inquisition, she’d demanded Leliana’s agents update both of them at the same rate. Of course, Leliana figured out a system with her people—careful ways to rephrase, or particular cyphers—and added surveillance was a small price to pay for Adaar’s favoritism. _Surveillance_ was too dramatic by half.

_Months and we’re not even close to sending them running for the border. I gave an order: get them out. And your agents are playing hide and seek with them in the desert, falling over their own feet in South Reach. Villages are burned out, kids are gone, and they’re gathering dragon carcasses for some kind of spell. If an army of ghostly dragon skeletons resurrects itself and marches up to Griffon Wing Keep, I’m going to send you the brick I’ll shit by raven._

Nothing she hadn’t heard before, or even laughed at, with a low chuckle and a shake of her head, in the past. But the light in the room blurred a little, and she blinked to refocus her eyes.

 _Pull out the stops, Nightingale. If Josephine sends me another letter about how Orlais and Ferelden are going to reinstate their own troops in the lands we cleared the second after we break Corypheus, I’ll—._ Adaar didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

It was easy to imagine her writing the letter by candlelight, scribbling with a heavy hand as fast as she could in a tent. Everything about Adaar was in pieces. Her horns were short stubs, the right lopped off before she was ten, the left during a hardscrabble battle with the Venatori out in the desert. One made a sword of fire in his hand, and skirted too close. Even her face was carved by knives. Two long, twin scars ran down each cheekbone. She’d been captured by bandits in her early days as a mercenary and they left their mark. The only proof they’d ever been alive at all, after the Valo-Kas had their way. Her cheekbones were elegant and high as any noble-bred lady’s.

_I don’t think I made myself clear. I didn’t send Josephine to whine about this, or Cullen to level hills. I sent you. They don’t love us in every corner of the world, in every tavern, in every Chantry. That’s fine. But aiding and abetting the enemy—that’s treason._

_You’re not afraid of anything. You do what needs doing, whether it requires sweet words or blood on the walls. I’ve seen it twice. You remember._

She did. The first was in the Inquisition’s infancy, when one of her agents betrayed them. She had ordered a swift death, and turned to Adaar ducking into the measly tent she’d used as a field office. Adaar said nothing then, just regarded her for a moment before going into business.

When her orders from Divine Justinia arrived, summoning her to Valence, Adaar bade her murder the only witness, a spy from Grand Cleric Victoire, and Leliana did it without hesitation. The proof was in the little golden box sitting in the corner of her desk. Justinia, wise and well-meaning, knew exactly what she was doing with Leliana at her side. The thought of recusing her from her actions—when good was done, and in service of a better Chantry, a better world—was folly. Not even Justinia was immune to mistakes.

_The people are helping them. Convince the people they shouldn’t. Search houses. Interrogate. I don’t care if they don’t love us. But make sure they know if they’re in bed with the enemy, it means a knife under the pillow._

The light shuddered again, the words shuddering briefly. Perhaps he edge of one of her—moments, where she lost time. Where she could blink, and suddenly be on the opposite side of the room. She set the letter down and leaned over it, her nose only an inch or two from the paper. The words swam, and then came back again.

No. It was only that it took so much for her to be truly surprised. She reached under her desk and pressed her hands to the wood. Solid. If she held onto it, her body would not move.

_Nobody on this continent wants to do a thing to change their situation. But you know how to stretch your arm out and knock the whole board over. Do whatever it takes. We didn’t work all these years just to lose everything when the rest of the world lost their nerve._

It was so quiet. Leliana could not hear her own heartbeat, only the memory of the high, breathy flute in the back of her mind. The ravens didn’t chatter in their corner, and even the mountain wind outside stood still. She wanted to look at her hands. Look at her face in the mirror, if she could move.

_There’s a place for you in the world. Don’t you get it? Everyone else’s given it up. I’m not going anywhere, and if you stick by my side, neither will you._

_Look. Vivienne, Josephine, Cassandra, Cullen, the Bull—disappointments, each and every one, because they have limits_. The three words clanged together like a bell. The ink on the page shivered. _What’s necessary in this world doesn’t have a boundary or border._

A price and a promise for her favorite. One of her nails broke from digging hard into the wood of the desk. The fragment splintered, and blood dribbled. The pain sharpened her focus, and she finished.

_We heard Corypheus is making a landing at Haven’s ashes. Cullen’s sending a few troops that way. Most of our people are still stuck in the Arbor Wilds. We’re on our way there without detour. I’m eager to see him and break him over my knee._

_Watch the sky._

 


	3. only one body

A throb began in the back of Leliana’s head, curling around her ear, from the moment she put down the letter. The pain reached across her skull with spidery legs, reminding her of black butterfly feet poking through a paper thin cocoon.

It refused to let her sleep. Discomfort was such an old friend it no longer disturbed her slumber, but the pain nipped with sharp teeth. It ebbed and surged in staccato. The rhythm was ceaseless. No, worse. Without mercy.

So she ignored it. Brewed tea for it, sipped wine and spirits, and did not think about Adaar’s letter, about Calpernia opening and closing her scarred hand, struggling as she practiced to stand. At night, when she sat alone at her desk, shuffling through missives, she did not pause to stare at the missive’s contents like an archaeologist examining ancient tombstones.

She did not think about how quiet Skyhold was. How Havar’s little home, lost in the mountain woods, was just as quiet.

 _Not quite real. Not as we know it, Nightingale._ The sound of the flute more often than not sounded like Calpernia, persistent and wry. It did nothing to cover the pain or her own obsession with Adaar’s instructions, which she’d committed to memory by the end of the second day. The voices fought instead, sliding against each other like metal files, and made everything impossible.

In between these distractions, she thought, _now I will send the order,_ quill in hand, and instead wrote a note to Sera about a noble in Val Firmin who abused the villagers slogging away in his diamond mine.

Even so, one strong voice, present and tangible, pressed upon her mind: _They have limits._

Crass Adaar, all fists, could only manipulate so much. She stumbled upon the golden magic of the phrase purely by accident. _You believe everyone has a place under the Maker’s sun_ , Josephine remarked once. They’d been sipping wine fireside in Haven. _Behind all the thorns and pointed arrows. It’s what you love, and how you balance._ And then she’d smiled, sweet as mead.

_I don’t care if they don’t love us. If they’re in bed with the enemy, teach them it means a knife under her pillow._

Yes. And not at all. Of course, every sore and unfortunate creature deserved the Maker’s love. But they were required—each and every one of them, with ears to hear, and a voice to raise—to praise his name, if they ever wanted to hear his voice again.

It required ruthlessness. It required everything. Adaar understood, just as Leliana always had. If Cullen was less inclined to his simpering canine loyalty, or Josephine less guided by her own morals, they would know the taste of absolution. Not victory. But _certainty._ Far rarer, more precious.

Many years ago, Leliana entered a chantry in one of the gold-fat towns just outside Val Royeaux, to stop for the night—as the Left Hand of the Divine, she could call upon any holy place for quarter. Upon swinging open the heavy doors, she found they turned the chantry into a marketplace. Finely cured meats from ropes, bolts of silk in every color—and Chantry orphans, running to and fro, carrying the purchases of nobles.

She had a moment, then, when she forgot herself. One of those times where reality slipped through her fingers, and she faded, or perhaps just the sudden strike of her own anger. When she came to, every table was turned over. The children fled. Glass covered the ground, broken into shards as fine as thread. (A seller with beaded shoes remained upright against the back of the temple, untouched and terrified.)

Leliana cherished beautiful things; the nausea she felt after seeing her destruction lingered for days. But the—idolatry. The noise. It drowned out anything good in that place. How could the sisters chant? How could the mothers sing? Not even the Maker himself could have been heard above the racket, if he chose to open his mouth.

A world of song, thought Leliana. A harmony so in tune it made silence tremble. The air would be filled with nothing else.

Now, perfection had arrived.

She knew it, because there was nothing to drown out the sound of her own head, rattling and cracking in endless ache. It was here, and living inside it was a trial. _I am the noise,_ she thought blearily to herself one morning as she rested her head on the floor, knees bent in prayer before her altar, fingers rubbing into the divot between her neck and skull. She did not slept in several days. Even the Maker’s silence did not comfort.

Nothing changed. Sense dictated she go down the mountain, see Calpernia, make an attempt to understand the new development. She told her what she was, and now the beast within roared.

But why bother? There was so much else to be done, and she would live. And she possessed no reason to delay the fulfillment of Adaar’s demands. Cullen requested a few scouts to assist his squadrons on their journey to meet Adaar outside the Valley of Sacred Ashes, and Leliana sent her ravens far and wide in preparation, to their boltholes along the Storm Coast and their secret way stations along the supply lines.

She lent their wings to Josephine, to alert Queen Anora and Celene the war would end at the dead center-point between their countries. She sent messages to Charter to prepare their networks. Maker knew they’d predicted this weeks ago—Charter was good enough at reading the way the tide turned she might as well have possessed the sight. ut she made sure they were prepared, and that their contacts in all the corners of the world knew the Inquisitor rode to face their mortal enemy once more.

But no ravens made their way west, and none flew south.

Days passed, hour by infuriating hour. She forgot the letter, then remembered with a force that screeched through her entire body. And when she sat to write, pushing her hood back from her head, and lighting a candle, a thousand new details sprung up beneath her fingers. _The end of everything_ , Josephine said the night before—or two nights before? She couldn’t remember. _With a whimper, and a thousand miles of paperwork._ A short, curling laugh. _She’ll hate that._

More work: invitations, reminders flown to those she still had cultivated from her days in the Great Game, the ones who would read her orders with silk fans gently fluttering against their ears. Words to the wise about how all would turn once Corypheus fell from his pedestal, and the quiet reminding of whatever favors were owed now the war was nearly over.

None flew to the battered, high keep of Griffon Wing, or the droplet-sized villages scattered in the valleys of the Reach.

Soon enough it would all be over, and she’d concern herself with scraping up the leavings of their enemies. Inevitability promised a particular amount of _time_ , after all.

After a long day spent hunkered around the war table, staring at a two sentence missive from Adaar ( _We’ll hit with the old bastard tomorrow and send him back up the Fade’s arse. Hope you’re ready to move.)_ , watching Cullen adjust his pieces with fingers that never shook anymore, fingers Leliana stared at in strange pause, and eyeing Josephine, scarcely paying attention for the letter she feverishly wrote in her chair in the corner, she arrived back in the rookery to find what she forgot found her first.

Chance came all on its lonesome, by way of a report neatly wrapped and waiting on her desk. Action, ready and waiting.

Her people managed to snag one of the Venatori fanatics.

They called her _Femina_ as a disguise in the letter. She was a lieutenant of some rank, they could decipher, but stubborn as the earth itself. No note of her appearance, other than a tattoo marking the inside of her forearm: _I sing for the one who hears me._ They caught a group of them fleeing a village with captives in hand, a Chantry burning to the ground. They began with offers and bribes, to cultivate her as a mole, to give her the illusion of a way out. She refused them all.

Through a variety of means, they tried to peel the information out of her skin.

They enclosed a list of their methods. Insurance, Leliana supposed, to prove they’d completed their due diligence. _Femina_ refused to speak. She did not even open her mouth.

Her people were thorough. They began with fingernails pulled by one, then forked the tip of her tongue before they began on her body. Leliana gave them free reign to do so; after all, it yielded results.

Marjolaine called it _rattling the mortal cage._ Not steely forethought. Just cheap tavern gin, swilled hard late at night. She tipped back in bed, the bottle empty on the floor. _They’ve only got one body, little bird. You forget until someone’s breaking it bit by bit._ Show them how little protects their soft insides. Show them how the armor breaks under a boot heel, or with a well-placed cudgel.

After they broke her knees, her ankles, her elbows and arms, her hands—the palms, then the fingers—and cut off her ears for good measure, she’d sighed once, deep as the ocean, and set herself on fire. Or—she gave herself over to ashes. _The flame was brief, hot as the sun, utterly complete,_ wrote the agent. _Controlled? I don’t know the word for it, Nightingale. She knew exactly what she was doing. Nothing left but what the wind might catch._

The ache inside her head went quiet for the first time in days. Only a hum remained, as though her very thoughts vibrated with effort.

More reassurances, more confessions of nothing. Adaar’s lecture would follow, full of fury and gnashing teeth, though perhaps if she destroyed Corypheus, the victory would warm her sense of mercy. But they were left with nothing. Nothing to start from, and nowhere to go.

She thought this, and then the image of the _femina_ , faceless and quiet, and broken with mechanical precision, bloomed in front of her eyes. The shriek returned with a fury, roaring its high notes inside her head. It tilted higher and higher, until Leliana pitched forward, scattering quills and pages across the floor. More words to crack Leliana’s head open as the world tilted underneath her bootsoles.

And then she was in the forest at the bottom of the mountain. Hours passed between blinks of her eyelids. The sun in the distance began to set, casting the trees in pink and orange. It only served to stoke her sense of time, how little there was to waste.

Her head pounded as she reached the glen, Havar’s round house, smoke puffing from the top and through the trees. Havar dug on her knees in the yard, burying potatoes in wet, muddy rows.

“One makes five,” she said as greeting when Leliana strode by. Whenever she paused, the edges of the world went grey—but she made herself halt for Havar, making her chest rise in even keel for her breath.

“One makes what?”

“Five pounds.” She looked pleased. “If you’ve got potatoes and a goat, you don’t need anything else to eat.” Her eyes dropped to Leliana’s hand. “What’s that there?”

Leliana looked, and saw a well-folded letter, clutched tightly in her glove. She shoved it in her pocket. “A report from Adaar,” she said smoothly, as though she’d always known she held it in her hand.

Havar grunted once, and then knelt down in the dirt again. Leliana blinked. Havar never masked her feelings, made no friend of deflection.

“Do suddenly have opinions on the Inquisitor?”

“Sure.” She rolled her shoulder, struck at the earth again.

“Speak on them.” But there was no answer, only the sound of dirt. Leliana took a breath, and her nerves tightened like a fist, spine straightening with authority. “Havar.”

She gave a little shrug, and some dried mud crumbled off her sleeve. “You never asked before.”

This _delay._ It said everything. “I’m asking now. The Avvar sent allies, servants, soldiers. You yourself came. Why?”

“Because the thanes like peace,” Havar told her. “And the best way to keep it is to hold hands with the biggest fist.”

A crack. Leliana heard it, distinctly, like a scratch against glass, far behind her eyes. Chipping. She folded her arms across her chest.

“Loyalty’s a lot of things, Pillar. We got cut up by the demons, and she helped us.” She raised an eyebrow. “Do you think we don’t know what _debt_ is, just because we worship the old gods?” A wheezy chuckle, a shake of her head. “Business is still business.”

Leliana considered her, and the letter burning a hole in her pocket. The world opened, clear as crystal, and Adaar’s words bolstered her, a wind at her back. _There’s a place for you in the world. Don’t you get it? Everyone else’s given it up._ “That’s not quite honesty.”

Havar opened her mouth, then closed it. Dug the trowel into the dirt for another hole. “Pillar,” she asked, amazed, “do you not know why we call her Half Mountain?”

A pause. “Well,” Leliana answered, dry as she could manage, “she’s the tallest woman in the south.”

Once, she cleaved an anger demon straight in two with her axe. It fell open, like a split tree, before dissolving into nothing. Her favorite anecdote to lean on in, the old days, when she wanted someone to fear the Inquisitor. But it was so common now it did the work for her.

Havar snorted, a glint of white teeth visible in her smirk. “The shadow she casts,” she said simply, “wherever she goes.”

~~~

The ache in her head settled in her teeth when she wrapped her fingers around Havar’s brass door handle. It rumbled in her jaw. Her body, shaking apart, although a glance down proved she still was present. For now.

Calpernia, in her usual sackloth, sat at the table picking at a a bowl of millet dotted with walnuts and currants. A thick grey pelt wrapped around her from her toes to just under her arms.

“Thought I’d seen the last of you,” she said, her head tilting up. Her hair had begun to grow back—fair, newborn stubble, too short to be soft.

“Why? We left on amicable terms.” Leliana pulled the hood from her head before sweat made her hair stick, and removed her gloves. She counted the knives hiding beneath her clothes, measured her tone exactingly. No different than any other negotiation. She would demand with perfection.

“I told you what you’re made of,” Calpernia said, “and you didn’t do—anything.” She shrugged. “I was almost impressed, but then I realized you’d probably written me off as a mad woman anyway. What do I matter?”

“No,” corrected Leliana, “I believe you.”

Calpernia hadn’t expected the answer, enough she let it show on her face. “Then—”

“I came on other business.”

She wanted to wield her voice like a rapier, curt as a razor point. Calpernia held the means to distract, to wrench conversations out of her grasp. Her control would not falter. Not today. There were years to unravel whatever mystery Leliana held inside. It could wait.

But Calpernia leaned back a little in her chair, her hands folded in her lap. As though she were a noblewoman, deigning to hear a caller. Her eyes fixed on Leliana’s face. “We spoke of your other business, once. I made my position clear.”

“Who shelters the Venatori across the south?” she asked.

She blinked. “I haven’t any idea,” she answered. “If I did, why would I tell you?”

“Because they seek to break our keeps, to pillage forts and murder our soldiers,” she said. “They steal children in the night. The soldiers are meant for this life, but the innocents—”

“Ah.” Calpernia had the nerve to scratch at the dirt under her fingernails. “You mean because your Inquisitor told you to do it.”

“Who hides them?”

“Nightingale—”

“ _Who_ ,” Leliana said, grinding in on the word like a blade.

“Probably the same people who sheltered you when you were a traitor fleeing across Thedas, assembling an army for a war no one thought you would win,” she snapped, and a small part of Leliana delighted in seeing her patience whither.

She rolled her eyes. “Is fighting a Blight the same as kissing its feet?”

Now Calpernia sat up a little, leaning forward in her chair with some effort. “Nightingale,” she said. “This isn’t what you want to ask me.”

“I’m not the topic at hand today.”

“You’re made of lyrium, and you haven’t even asked _how_ ,” she snapped, dispensing of her cool demeanor for the moment. “Has nothing changed? She has you cowed like a dog, if you want to snip about this, rather than understand why you can’t see your own face in the mirror!”

“It can wait.” Her words were cold, bored. “I thought you understood that. But—well. This is your habit.” She glanced out the window. “So focused on your own ambitions. Perhaps that’s why Corypheus decided to use you as nothing more than a glorified _vase._ ”

“That’s not—”

“Isn’t it?” Leliana couldn’t help the laugh edging into her voice. “One of the greatest mages in all Tevinter, and his most worthwhile plan made you no more complex than a water cistern. You could not put aside what you wanted.” She watched Calpernia’s fingers clench. “What a folly.”

“And what did you build, Nightingale?” Calpernia asked, with great effort to keep her voice soft.

“An Inquisition.” The words were sure as stitches in cloth, one right after the next. “United and unbreakable. Not only a fist, but an arm, and a body, and feet to walk from continent to continent.”

Behind her eyes, another _crack_ , like the thin sheet of ice covering Haven’s lake just as winter began. A sharp sound, brief as a gasp. It felt like a chisel boring through the side of her head into the meat of her brain. Some piece of her awareness realized she only had a certain amount of time before—something—happened. Her focus didn’t falter.

“Always?” she asked, still quiet as a mouse. I win, thought Leliana. All that pride and ambition had a soft spot.

“Every finger grips the sword.” Adaar said something like that to Cullen once, and even she’d felt its power across the table. “No Left Hand, no Right. No senseless divisions. When we work as one, the blow goes clean through.”

Utter silence. Even as raw metal scraped back and forth between her ears, the sound protesting in its own voice, Leliana felt a cold calm settle in her chest. It even quieted a little.

“I’m calling my boon,” Calpernia said suddenly, and her jaw went tight.

Odd. Leliana waved a hand. “Yours to waste, Tevinter.” She’d never called her that before, and it felt good. Easy.

“You gave the order to drag me from the river.” Not a question. “What orders did you give your people?”

Something shifted, a thought or a piece of the puzzle, and the brilliant-high flute echoed in the stone depth of her brain. “Is that really what you want to ask?”

“What orders, Nightingale?” she repeated. “Word for word. I know your memory’s—”

“Please,” she sneered, all cold. “I remember.” And she did, clear as the spring day outside, the sun shining through the windows. “To burn you, if you were dead. Or to bring you back alive.” The high arc of sound, brushing aside fog. “I told them—take pains.”

“Pains.” The word fell between them like a gavel. Leliana shrugged.

“No point in wasting you,” she said. “If you were alive, I wanted you to stay that way.” For then, at least. When she’d appeared in Havar’s house, an inch away from death, directions had seemed pointless.

None of this seemed to penetrate. Calpernia narrowed her gaze. “Havar says I was shattered within an inch of my life.”

“You threw yourself off a cliff,” Leliana pointed out dryly. “There _are_ consequences.”

“Both my feet were broken,” Calpernia said, and then the song pitched up another note. It recognized something in what she said, but Leliana would not give it an inch of power.

“Find your point.”

“My ankles,” Calpernia said, tonelessly, a ritual spell carving itself from spoke. “Both kneecaps. My hips.”

Leliana wrinkled her nose, and spoke with the tone of one addressing a very small child. “You fell _far_ ,” she said. “Bashed against rock and cliff before you ever hit the water, and Andraste herself could hardly slow you.”

“Ribs,” Calpernia said louder, and the flute song rose with her in harmony, curling behind Leliana’s eyes, “on both sides. My shoulders. An attempt on both elbows, though only one fractured.”

“You’re reaching,” Leliana told her, even as the letter from her people danced in front of her eyes. It ushered her down here, calm as two hands on her shoulders, to tilt her head towards this, _this_ , whatever it was.

Some calm part of her knew it. A part that still held her voice, and still spoke her own name as though it were her own. An inch of her, small enough to be forgotten, but enough to wrap itself around her soul.

“Whoever stepped on my hands,” Calpernia said, looking at her palms as they flexed open, stiff as wood, “wore spurs.”

Leliana had counted the serrated little scars across the hills of skin, digging into her wrist. Like a metronome of flesh, she stared at them, as she did now, to find increments of reality.

The pause between them clouded the room, so thick Leliana couldn’t breathe. And the sound only grew louder. A rising cry of agreement, or protest, or whatever it was—it made her thoughts short and sharp, rattling inside her skull like broken glass. The stillness slipped from her.

She spat, “It hardly matters. You deserve worse than death.”

Calpernia’s eyes flashed (with victory? satisfaction? impossible to tell) and she shrugged —and the tiny carelessness of the motion, the ripple of effort it took for her to show just how she agreed, made Leliana’s blood cold as ice.

Knife-tipped, without preamble. “You are a murderer.”

“I am,” said Calpernia.

“Good men and women died because of you. You burned our home to the ground. Lyrium infests the continent and we’ll be digging it out for decades.”

She waved her hand in imitation of Leliana. A hand marked by a peculiar line of scars down the wrist. _Spurs_ , Leliana thought, and the word washed through her like lye, until Calpernia’s voice parted the thought, and she said, “I don’t deny it.”

“Your master killed the Divine and unleashed panic and terror. We will bear the scars of your work for generations.” Her skin felt alight with fire. “There are graves littered across Thedas with your name as their signature.”

“Yes, Nightingale.” The utter _patience_ in her voice, as Calpernia tilted her head up to look her squarely in the eye. “And my people never doubted my word when it came to the enemy.”

Everything inside Leliana’s head went quiet. A candle, snuffled out by two fingertips.

“Your Inquisition has no justice,” she said, the scar across her face cast into shadow. “Even my cut-throat, black-hearted scoundrels know what it is, and who will give it to them. Your people hold no such faith.” Her mouth pulled into a thin line.

“They lean on me.” Leliana’s voice was dry. “They look to me.”

“If they did, they’d follow your orders.” Calpernia looked down at her bandages, the thick wolf pelt covering miles of linen and months of effort. “Instead they saw Corypheus’ half-dead general and didn’t think _the Nightingale will give her what’s owed._ ”

The sound rose, and Calpernia’s face split in two at the pain of it. It wobbled back together slowly, and the air shuddered.

“You follow _her_ ,” she continued. “I know how this works and so do your people. It’s their job to know which way the wind blows. And Adaar—” She swallowed the name, because it could be a hundred different names, yes? Names littered throughout time, or just the span of Leliana’s life, “—she does not share power.”

Leliana’s nostrils flared. “I work behind the throne.” The statement was clunky and melodramatic when spat in anger. “I’m not a court noble in need of public displays of favor—”

“You’re the blade, Nightingale.” Calpernia didn’t even raise her voice. “The means to her end. However you want to say it.” Her gaze was the clearest thing in the room, a vision to cut through pain, and sound, and the fear of glancing down to see her hands disappeared. “Only room for one hand on the hilt, but it works out rather beautifully for her if you believe otherwise, don’t you see?”

“Bitterness as panacea,” Leliana said coldly. “I’d convince myself of the same, if I were you.”

“Precisely. I thought I held power, ” she snapped, her patience wavering once more. “Instead I was a cistern.”

 _And here I sit_ went unsaid. Pain rippled through her skull, from teeth to crown, and she had to close her eyes, for just a moment, to push it away. “You’ve still made no case for why it matters now.”

“Because you’re dying,” said Calpernia, her voice going rough on the last word. “Isn’t it obvious? Or do you think I have the heart to muster compassion for every enemy who breaks my legs?”

A light behind her eyes sparked, went white. The ache in her head splintered, the room spun. And then Leliana disappeared.

~~~

The bleak tide of the night sky, dotted with pinprick stars. They swarmed on a static current, crackling with light as they moved closer, jostled together like marbles, and the world suddenly swam white.

She knew it wasn’t _snow_ , only it was how her human eyes could picture it, how her mind could make sense. Quieter, here. No tuneless flute crying its last breath. She breathed in and out, and the puffs of air caught the light, a dull glitter.

She seemed perched atop a wide lake, deep blue and lightning streaked, swirling beneath her feet. If she owned them still. Instead she felt her spirit dip, press close to the surface, her nose nearly touching. Her breath rippled against the surface, and then it began to churn, far below. Burnished thunder, the color of Havar’s rusted gold mirror, erupted. She could not hear it, but felt the reverberation inside her bones—no bones, no body here, but it shook her, a tremble to stir the universe—

Leliana could not hold what she saw. It trapped her in an endless path, time flooding every which way at once. She saw her mother, making white garlands of Andraste’s Grace, and watched the petals dissolve into snow, a cold and blustering wind as she and Cassandra rode horseback south on a mission for the Divine. The blizzard pelted them so hard she could barely see, and Cassandra sang in her hard, blocky voice, so Leliana would know where to follow. And Leliana sang back, a bird-like tune lost in the wind.

The sound pulled her through, the lock of a needle and thread in cloth, to the Game and spinning gowns, flowers unfurled in every shade of red for the Empress’ Crimson Ball, held every year to remember the dead lost in battle in Orlesian war. She sang alongside a lute, matching its plucked notes with little hops of her own, and saw a young face in the crowd—warm, brown skin, and wide eyes, and a nose royal enough to rival Celene herself. The nose held a thin, charming gold ring—how she regretted Josephine’s decision to take it out when she became a diplomat. But now she watched those wide eyes open a little wider every time she achieved another height in her _cadenza—_

The pictured darkened, blood spilled into the water. Marjolaine loved to sing, loved Leliana’s voice, insisted they sing together for their supper whenever an opportunity presented itself. She could hear Marjolaine in her own voice, a ghostly echo reaching out beyond the grave, beyond wherever Marjolaine was now—

Dorothea, before she was Justinia, pouring clear water into Leliana’s cup. Her wrinkled face was soft, focused. _The world is better with you in it,_ Leliana told her. _I’ll make sure it happens. You’ll_ do something _on the Sunburst Throne. We can make Thedas the type of place the Maker wants to look down upon._

Dorothea, laughing. _You want all the perfection of heaven, my child?_

 _Yes._ Leliana took a drink. The water was cold, swirled in the glass. _Why not?_

Her laughter dissolved into a tired sigh. It made her sound older than she was. _There are still gallows in paradise, Leliana. They just hang the anointed ones with silk rope._

The sound of the Breach tearing open the sky, a flooding sea cast upon the land. Adaar’s grey face, obscuring the sun—

Water, rushing. Josephine’s grey-green eyes, and the waterfall pouring itself out of Skyhold. You could always smell it in the Undercroft. Cave minerals, the cold tang of water underground. Leliana, sitting alone but for the sound of the water, leaning just close enough to the shaperate crystal that it sprang to life, happy to be touched—

 _Is your tea alright?_ A little shadow, her braids hanging loose down her back, shuffled nervously. Young, maybe only sixteen, but hard lives made age hard to read these days. She could be twenty, twenty-one.

Calpernia raised her head. She sat at a desk, lit by one tall candle. The light flickered in the blue, casting their faces strange, dim light. She took an experimental sip, set the cup back down neatly.

_Well?_

_I like mine a little sweeter_ , she confessed. Leliana remembered—mint, for settling the inside. Perhaps that was Calpernia’s secret to being utterly nerveless.

Linnea’s face went drawn, and she watched Calpernia straighten abruptly, leaning forward. Wanting to correct the mistake.

 _I’ll fetch some honey for you—_ , and then she called Calpernia a word in Tevene Leliana didn’t recognize. Some kind of honorrific. Now Calpernia stood, her knees bent, all of her fingers still touching the desk. Enough just to pause Linnea at the door.

 _No_ , she said firmly. _There’s no need for that. I can find the honey pot myself._

_But—_

_Linnea. I’m not your master._ Calpernia’s face knitted itself in thought. She did not know how to explain it, Leliana realized, because she herself was so new in the role. _You don’t need to wait on me hand and foot._

 _I beg your pardon, ma’am,_ Linnea said, swallowing the honorrific, _but a few coins each week hardly separates one from the other._

Calpernia looked struck by this, as though she hadn’t needed to eat and clothe herself in the wake of freedom. Of course, she’d walked directly into Corypheus’ arms. Perhaps she’d never needed anything.

But it rattled her. Leliana could see it as though she opened a window into her soul. She’d forgotten.

 _I’ll talk to Tharasian,_ Calpernia finally said. Leliana surmised he was a steward of some kind. _We can afford better wages._

 _Linnea blinked._ What good will that do?

 _I don’t want you thinking whether you eat tonight or not depends on their—my—happiness,_ Calpernia said. _I want it to be for your good work. Your effort. Your efficiency._ Her brow furrowed. _What other people worry about, I suppose, when trying to make a living._

 _Pardon, but…_ Linnea hesitated, only continuing when Calpernia waved her on. _You’re a magister, ma’am. You’ll always have living._

The mistake in phrasing wasn’t lost on either of them, and she watched Calpernia look down at the liquid swirling in her teacup. She filled in what the shadows couldn’t, now. How the candlelight cast shadows across her face, the freckles dotting her beak of a nose, smooth cheeks. The unremarkable pallor of her yellow hair.

 _You are your own,_ Calpernia finally said, folding her gloved hands in front of her. _Do whatever you can to learn that in your bones. It will take ages, but it’s possible._

She watched Linnea suppress a tired huff out of politeness. _You say that, and the opposite happens every day._

Calpernia paused in thought, opened the the top drawer of her desk, and placed a tiny gem between them. It glinted. Linnea squinted at it.

 _That’s—_ she began, tilting her head. _That’s Vicinius’ earring._

_Correct._

_He never took it out. It’s spelled against eavesdropping._ Linnea suddenly wrung her hands together. _It warmed his skin if we listened at the door._

Calpernia coughed quietly. _The Venatori pulled it from his severed head._

She said nothing, only stared at the ear-drop.

 _It means nothing to other people,_ Calpernia began slowly, her tone quiet, _how they live, or why. Even if we all die here, even if the Inquisitor takes her axe to each of our heads, that’s my promise to you._ She nodded at the little gem.

Linnea picked it up between her forefinger and thumb, held it close to her eyes. She didn’t look at Calpernia. But Leliana could tell her ears pricked, hanging on every word.

 _You will never belong to anyone,_ she said. _You will never belong to me._

The images faded, and the subsequent jolt shook her, pulled her out of the memory and back into the blinding, cold world of the in-between, or wherever her soul was caught now.

It wasn’t raiding villages for Venatori sympathizers, or the torture of captives, or the disobedience which cracked Calpernia’s bones. Leliana did or ordered worse herself. Only the realization this, like everything else, had never been worth it. Each new hand dealt, from the moment Marjolaine scooped her up to when Justinia died in the Conclave, and she’d found herself at Adaar’s side, assumed her best use.

She had fallen for it, each time. Hungry for demands. Hungry to do _work_. Leliana knew very little existed in this world she’d turn away from doing if her heart was in it.

She believed in this, once.

Light, glimmering bright as a comet, and a wild hum screaming in in her ears. The sound of a coloratura holding a bird-high note, winding in and in and in on itself, never ending. It was—too much, so enormous it filled her from foot to crown, the sound pouring out of her mouth and ears and nose, white and blue shadow, a sound that threatened to break her into pieces.

She reappeared in the world with a silver shriek, a flash of light. She collapsed instantly, unable to breathe. A distant crash, and then someone hauled her into a sitting position; Calpernia was there, _how_ , did she throw herself out of the chair and onto the floor? The warmth of her hands radiated through her chainmail, her gambeson, and then she was held against a body, warm and human. The room spun and spun, and Leliana closed her eyes, found herself praying in a way she hadn’t in years. _Enough_ , she thought. _Please, enough._

She leaned into it, forgetting her weight, forgetting Calpernia couldn’t possibly support them both. But a heartbeat nestled herself under her ear, a chin rested against the top of her head. The arms holding her shook from weakness, but clutched her tightly. She smelled blood. It stilled the rattling in her head, pressed upon the headache with comfort.

A hand gripping her wrist. She could feel the scars on the skin like the touch of matches.

“Oh,” Calpernia murmured, a serrated breath to steady herself, “oh, I didn’t think—I didn’t think you were coming back.”

~~~

The pulse of ebbing adrenaline gave Leliana enough to drag them against the wall, to pull the thick wolf pelt back over Calpernia’s bandaged legs. Her breath turned ragged after they stopped moving—pain flowing through her muscles just as blood did, aching and complaining after all the movement. Her face went pale as a ghost’s with agony, but she did not ask for help, or plead for her to find Havar—she only breathed, in and out, eyes squeezed shut.

Havar eventually came back in, and made no remark at the state of them. She gave Leliana a bowl of tea, and changed Calpernia’s poultices after making her drink a scummy green potion that eased her. The bandages came away, revealed blue-black bruises and hard-stitched skin. The comfrey smelled coppery, and Calpernia leaned forward to try to wrap her own bandages. She managed them in slow movements, though Havar leaned over and did them again, ten times quicker. They moved in routine.

 _I make her drink lyrium and healing potions like water_. The words of her reports came echoing back. All the work, just for this. She would never walk properly again, Leliana realized. Calpernia would wobble and hunch her entire life.

They sat there in the quiet for a long time. The silence settled differently here. In Skyhold, it was an empty mouthful. Here, it took a deep breath.

“It didn’t matter.” Leliana’s voice surprised even herself, sometime after night settled. She wasn’t in the habit of offering answers, but she couldn’t stop thinking of Calpernia’s _how?_ “How I work, how I feel, what I do to achieve my ends has never mattered. Whether I was human, or—” She struggled with the word.

“Lyrium,” supplied Calpernia. “A figure. A—ghost. I don’t know.”

“Lyrium.” The word felt sticky in her mouth. “What difference did it make, as long as the work was done?” And done well.

Calpernia had the tact not to name the obvious: _because your brain no longer functions correctly, because your body is fading from the earth, because you are_ suffering. Leliana could reach each answer in her eyes, and some little part of her felt grateful for none of them being named aloud. It felt too much like pity.

Instead, Calpernia said, “I knew the rumors of the Well of Sorrows, of what Corypheus planned for Erasthenes. I planned to drink anyway.” She gave a shrug.

Leliana also remembered contents of those rumors—she spun them herself. “Foolish,” she chided. “He would have made you his puppet. Destined to be nothing and _no one._ ”

She gave a listless rise-and-fall of her shoulders, her eyes closing. “It all has to be for something, doesn’t it?” she asked, and the quiet, uncertain tone of her question made Leliana’s heart stop in recognition. “Not just for me. All the people who believed in him, and what we were doing. I carried their lives in my hands, just like my staff. What was the point of it all—the suffering, the blood, comrades taken or given up, sacrificed—if at the end, I lacked the courage for the final blow?”

Her words sat there, shared like air between them. Such a small question, but persistent. The shackles it made weighed heavy as the world itself. Leliana recognized it. At every turn, it waited and asked again.. _Stop_ , said her spirit. _It’s much too late_ , said the rest of her.

“Perhaps you have the courage to deny it, Nightingale,” Calpernia murmured. “I don’t.”

Leliana did not speak, but did not lie. That itself could be enough.

After another silence, Calpernia spoke again. “The Avvar would rather die than be captured, Havar told me. I thought I understood it, waking up here in my own filth. All my limbs broken like a doll’s.” Her head made a soft _thump_ as it leaned against the wall. “But it could be worse.” She, undoubtedly, held the expertise.

“I can’t apologize for what my people did.” Leliana meant it, even as she remembered Havar’s note about how Calpernia flailed in her dreams, trying to scramble away from cudgels and bootheels. “I might’ve struggled with the temptation myself. If you expect me—”

“I don’t.” Her voice, at least, was firm. “I only sought to illuminate the fallacy.”

“Stop talking like you think it’ll impress me.”

“Fine.” She sounded a little stung. It was so human. “What—”

“If you ever speak of—talking to me, assisting as _redemption_ again, death will feel like sipping wine,” Leliana warned her. “I don’t care for your motivations or your compassion.”

A long pause, and then Calpernia nodded. “You weren’t born lyrium,” she said, and suddenly the topic of Leliana’s existence was at hand.

“No,” she agreed.

“What reason do you have,” asked Calpernia, “to live this way?” And Leliana had no answer.

Havar slept deeply on her own pallet; the sound of her breathing settled the room with a calm she could feel in her stomach. Leliana remembered the river lapping at the bank from—somewhere, where was it? The stream running by Lothering where she’d go fetch water at the mother’s insistence ( _no, not the well where_ these people _drink, Sister Leliana_ ), or was it Kirkwall’s docks, and the Waking Sea, and just her imagination?

The world tossed her so many places, so many corners of Thedas, she’d have gone mad trying to remember them all. But Calpernia cocked her head and spoke as though the conversation never stopped. “Perhaps someone cast a spell on you,” she offered, “or you were cursed. The beginning’s the most important thing to crack.”

“It isn’t,” Leliana said firmly, “not when it’s a gamble of whether or not I’ll see my fingers lifting this cup to my lips.” The headaches, the disappearing, the reappearing—

Calpernia smirked a little. “I don’t see anything awry with your hands or your lips yet, Nightingale.” But then she sobered, stretched out her hand over the arm of the chair. The tips of her fingers glowed with soft blue light, so quickly Leliana blinked and it was gone.

It took effort to keep her hand open like that, even though Calpernia’s hands had improved drastically since she’d been a motionless form under a roughspun blanket. But Leliana was not in the mood for another working, or searching her soul for answers, or unravelling some story long forgotten in the back of her mind.

But shedidn’t reach over and wrenched Leliana’s hand into her own, or demanded she take it because of magic or progress or whatever excuses she needed. She only peeled her stiff fingers open, deliberate with effort, and offered.

Only two commands existed in Leliana’s life now: the will of the Inquisitor, and the bend of her agents when she set them on their path. No negotiation. No one simply asked for anything anymore, and not without condition.

So when she found herself delicately resting her hand in Calpernia’s, she wondered how long it had been this easy.

Any court lord or lady from South Reach to the Anderfels would have tut-tutted at Calpernia’s hands, called them _ruined_ and proffered gloves to cover them up. The calluses scraped against her own, skin broken by scrubbing and washing and lye. Even Minaeve, the monster-butcher of Haven, possessed hands like any other mage—callused, here and there, but mostly worn smooth by book pages. These hands worked, and did not stop working.

“You call it disappearing,” Calpernia thought out loud. “When was the first time it happened?” At the silence, she said, “The first time you opened your eyes, and couldn’t remember your feet bringing you there.”

It came to her like the morning. A swift word, found on her tongue by accident. “Haven,” she said.

Calpernia blinked. “Haven,” she repeated. “The _Inquisition?_ You said—”

“Long ago.” Leliana waved her hand. “It wasn’t my first time at Haven, with the Inquisition. We found it when the Hero of Ferelden—” She stopped short.

The memory came over her, all pins and needles, and made her muscles curl in on themselves. She wanted to be holding a knife, not this bony, callused mage hand. She could not stop herself from making a fist, from squeezing Calpernia’s fingers until the knuckles popped.

She had not thought of him in years. His face yawned in her mind like the Breach, a monstrous mouth full of teeth.

“Cousland,” muttered Leliana. Emrys Cousland, dragging them from Redcliffe to Haven, up into the Frostbacks where the Urn of Sacred Ashes lay. A smiling, handsome face, only made more handsome by the rogueish scars across his nose and forehead. Clean, white teeth, and a smile sweet as cream. Leliana hadn’t realized how many people she could watch fall in love with a man until she lost count. Nobles respected him, peasants thought he walked out of a storybook. _Prince Emrys_ , Alistair teased, always with a little warmth behind his eyes.

He thought of her well enough, but never _liked her_ —not like Alistair or Morrigan, who wanted to follow him to the farthest reaches of Thedas, or Sten, who respected his ruthlessness and his way with a broadsword. No. Leliana, a gentle Chantry sister, knew the edges of a mask when she saw one, and he sensed it.

“We were tasked to find Andraste’s Ashes,” Leliana began carefully. “We needed it to secure the Arl of Redcliffe’s support against the Blight. It made him so angry.” No need to say who _him_ was. “Every night we spent away, it boiled in him. We’d done a hundred errands for everyone, desperate to get an army, but this—it was the last straw.”

“Finding the ashes of Andraste holds more esteem than—I don’t know. Finding goats for peasants to eat, if someone’s looking for glory.”

“Before Logain put his family to the knife, I don’t think the Arl of Redcliffe would even have dared look him in the eye,” Leliana said, and felt Calpernia exhale next to her.

“How hard for him.” The sourness in her voice almost made her smile.

“His whole family was murdered in front of his eyes,” Leliana said with a shrug. “People have done worse for less.”

The anger. It churned in him, gave him the energy to raise his head from the bedroll in the morning and to lift his blade against his enemies. He was not remotely Andrastean, but he had the words _fire is her water_ tooled in little letters along the scabbard of his weapon. Not remotely. His water was poisoned, and it destroyed him, and all of them.

“He made a deal with a cult we’d tangled with. Haven’s previous residents. Spoiled Andraste’s ashes.” She nodded at how Calpernia’s eyebrows rose up her forehead. “I pulled my bow on him, and woke up outside the mountain, near Haven’s lake.” She paused for a long time. “When we quartered there, I would go to that spot. Stand, pace, think.”

“Plot,” Calpernia added.

This time a little smile found its way to her mouth. “Yes.” A long pause, as she strung together the pieces. “I thought I came to in the middle of a windstorm,” she said. “The wind was so high and brittle.” It was the song, the one knitting along her spine. She knew it now. “I thought he dumped my corpse. But he—no.”

She made a sound, a _hmm_ to nudge Leliana along.

“I think he would have found it a waste of time,” she finished. “I woke up, and walked west to the Sunburst Throne.” And there it began, all over again. She hadn’t thought of him in years. Perhaps the gap was intentional.

“He killed you there,” Calpernia said, and it wasn’t a question. “A place like that, full of magic…” She trailed off.

“The right place at the right time?” she asked. When no answer came she said, “Calpernia.

“I was just thinking how worthy of study it’d be. We could spend years there, and just scratch the surface.” A sigh. “But we blew it up, didn’t we?”

Leliana gave a soft, ungainly snort, and Calpernia hid one of her little smiles behind her hand. Once, she couldn’t think of Justinia without losing where she was—nothing to do with lyrium, and everything to do with grief. But here she could laugh at the bleakness.

“ _How_ is not the question I have,” she asked, finally. “But why. Why now?”

“What’s different?” Calpernia indulged her. “Have you done anything particularly—moving, lately? Something that might rend your soul?”

The prospect was absolutely unspeakable. “Do you mean it’s some sort of—” Leliana paused, horrified. “A _moral_ compass?”

Calpernia pursed her lips. “You believe in the Maker,” she told her. “He meddles with you, perhaps. Your destiny.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’d hypothesize you were sculpted from mud and given life by one of the Moritalitasi’s cats before I think took a personal interest in you,” she deadpanned. “But, please. Believe what you like.”

“Perhaps not his doing,” Leliana said, “but he is my Maker.” And that was the end of that argument.

She sighed. “Your mind can’t lie to your body,” she said flatly. “It knows you’re not worthy of this. Wherever you are now. It’s not what you’re meant to do, or where you should be.”

“By that logic, nothing has been.”

Calpernia squeezed her hand. Heat spread from her palm, traveled up her tendons, and spread across her shoulder. “It’s not precision, not specificity _,_ but weight.”

“A simpleton’s measure.” Leliana stared at her. “I can’t—”

“Nightingale.” Her tone held no pity, no soothing tones, only certainty. “Perhaps you’ve just had _enough.”_

Truth, in large enough doses, might kill Leliana before the lyrium could, and this was no exception. She did not permit wallowing, did not permit admission of her weariness, of this Inquisition dragged her far and away since its inception.

“What are you doing?” Leliana asked instead, voice sharp, staring down at their hands. “Something to sense the lyrium? A spell?”

Calpernia blinked. “Oh. No.” She only buckled and went on when the point of Leliana’s stare became too much. “I anticipated this would be difficult.” Hardly. Time mended the grievance to a scratch on the memory, and no more. “I wanted—”

She stopped. Oh. _Oh._

To be a comfort, Leliana knew, but could not finish for her. But she let their hands lie together, clasped as best they could.

If they had been two players in the Great Game—Leliana wrapped in blue silk, her skirts whispering across the floor, and Calpernia, an elegant northerner swathed in black gloves and taffeta. Even in her girlish braids and ruined hands, every circle would have found her a topic of discussion. All her sharp angles. The gap-tooth—polarizing in every way, from _charming_ to _peasant-like._ The piercing way she looked at every person. Some bard would draw comparisons to ravens, all lovely, bleak feathers and sharpness, eyes without lids.

They would cross paths sooner or later, and then again, and again, and learn how tired both found themselves of being used like torches to light the night sky. Nothing spoken so plainly, of course. But other languages lent themselves to this. At some point their hands would find each other, winding carefully where no one could see. Where no one could gather it like arrows to be drawn at just the right moment of underbelly-white weakness.

She would tug Calpernia’s glove from her fingers, the sound of satin sliding along skin—

A little huff of breath beside her, air sucked through teeth. The scent of warm skin as her lips pressed against the back of Calpernia’s good hand—here, where they sat by dim hearthlight in the middle of the woods. Her thumb touched the spur-scars, lining them like stones along a pathway. All she’d allow herself, teetering so close to the edge of whatever this was as she raised her head—

And then a mouth was on hers, clumsy and demanding. For a woman who’d thrown herself from a cliffside to prevent capture, Calpernia refused retreat. Her breath was hot, her lips chapped and dry, but she would not let this chance slip away. Leliana could taste it in her breath. Not desperation. Just—tenacity.

An unwillingness to let her spend her last night on earth _just sitting._

She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until Calpernia pulled away, still barely an inch between their face. No evidence of anxiety, until she glanced down, as though she’d just remembered she was covered in bandages, dirt, and rough linen, covered in her own sweat.

Leliana promptly distracted from hesitation. Time was of the essence. She kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the long line of her neck. The faint burn scar behind her ear, worn smooth by healing. She tasted of salt, and all her tendons tensed beneath her lips. Unaccustomed to gentle touch, rough touch, or touch at all.

As far as graceful liaisons went, it wasn’t: she asked Calpernia if she could be gentled onto her back, and she refused—it was painful and she wouldn’t be able to get up again. Calpernia made so little sound when being touched Leliana thought more than once they should stop—only to be met with _if you take your hands off me, I’ll break them,_ and teeth nipping at her lips, and a mesmerizing blush fanning across her pale skin. It bloomed down her neck, her clavicles, disappeared beneath the rough fabric of her shift.

They settled on Leliana sliding behind Calpernia’s back so she could lean against her—once she’d pulled off her boots, her chainmail, her armor. One of her dagger handles poked into the small of her back against the wall. She propped Calpernia’s legs open to rest against her own, traced her nails down whatever skin wasn’t covered in bandages. A handful of thigh, unbruised and unmarked, made her breath hitch and her back arch.

She pressed her fingers against Calpernia’s lips until they parted, let them slide back and forth against her tongue. When she slid them under the hem of her shift, Calpernia gasped once, her nails digging into Leliana’s leg.

Pleasure took time. Calpernia’s perpetual hurt, though frequently ignored, made the entire journey longer. Work, to make sure she was wet enough and her fingers, rocking into her until her entire body tried to move, each little ripple a victory.

When Calpernia came, her voice shivered in the air—a sigh dissolving into a whispery moan, her good hand instantly clapping over her own mouth to stopper the sound. But she could not stop herself from making it. And so Leliana endeavored to produce the sound again: once, twice, three more times, until her head lolled back against her shoulder, her forehead stained with sweat.

They paused for breath, Leliana subtly rotating her wrist as she slid out from behind her, sitting next to her in a heavy heap on the pallet. When Calpernia spoke, her voice was—bashful. “I can’t—I only have this.” Calpernia wiggled the fingers of her good hand, and tried to speak through her own blush, “ _One handed_ is the way you wield a sword, not _pleasure a woman—_ ”

“You only need the one,” Leliana said, guiding it between her legs. The low laughter in her ear made her skin tremble, made the night stretch longer than it should, as though it, too, had nothing better to do than give them this.

~~~

In the very early hours of the morning, they lay on the pallet, Calpernia carefully adjusted for her legs, and Leliana on her side. She hadn’t slept, only watched Calpernia doze in and out of dreaming.

Dying—was the wrong word for it. She knew it, could feel the song pressing on the back of her eyes with gentle persistence. Only time. Enough of it could feel like death. But there was always somewhere else.

When she woke, she looked at the window behind them, the way the rising sun cast faint orange shadows in the trees. “Another boon, Nightingale.”

“I’m not a charity,” said Leliana, and Calpernia flicked the inside of her wrist with a nail.

“My first was hardly met,” she pointed out.“Take me somewhere to watch him die.”

A poor idea, and Leliana said as much.

Calpernia waved this away with a graceful flutter of her fingers. “Please,” she said. “He came from beyond the Veil, she’ll have to rip a hole open with her teeth to send him back through it.”

For a moment, regret flooded Leliana, simple as breathing. She did not want to go. How little this was, whatever they’d scrapped together between them, how much power and potential it could have—and never would. When they left the hovel, they’d walk to the end of the line.

But then those callused fingers tapped her chin, in quiet agreement, and Leliana looked back down.

“I imagine the light show,” Calpernia finished, a ghost of a smile on her pale face, “will be _spectacular._ ”

 


	4. epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Lyrium sang thought into being. Now time is stale, and the melody is called elsewhere. Until I am needed, I am free._

“You never asked me to fix it for you,” Calpernia remarked, her lips in Leliana’s ear. Her arms wrapped around her neck for purchase as Leliana hauled her up a hill. She had offered the use of magic, but Leliana scoffed and lifted her up like a bag of Havar’s potatoes. Havar waved to them from her garden and went back to scraping at the earth with her trowel.

She never told Adaar about Havar, about the bolt hole at the mountain base. Her memory, piecemeal as it was, worked in her favor, or perhaps purposefully.

And now Leliana rolled her eyes, not bothering to pause for breath. “Oh? And now you’re going to tell me you’d like to mend my lyrium problem.”

“Not at all.” Calpernia’s arms tightened when Leliana . “I assumed you’d wonder about it. Demand it.”

If she’d thought about it, she didn’t say. A stump sat at the top of the hill, one of the massive pine trees felled for Skyhold’s repairs and expansions. She set Calpernia down upon it before perching next to her, stretching out her long legs. The sky was a solid mass of grey cloud, the kind of thick blanket threatening to unleash a torrent of rain and thunder at any moment. The air buzzed with static, and the scent of water lay heavy in the air. A headache began, low and almost sweet, at the back of her skull. Leliana breathed in and out.

But Calpernia was going on about something. “It’s a little like the moon. I can tell you what it is, and where it rises. But it’s—”

“Far beyond your talents. Is this an attempt at flattery?”

“No.” She clucked her tongue. “Although your spots are wide enough to be craters.”

 _I will leave you here_ , Leliana nearly threatened, and then swallowed the words on her tongue. She would, after all. No point in making the threat if it was destined to come through anyway.

If Calpernia sensed the change in her, she said nothing about it. “Beyond my ambition to change,” she told her instead.

“How sentimental.” Leliana wrinkled her nose. “Not very Tevene at all.”

“Tevinter should spend more time looking down at people on the ground.”

“And not up at the Old Gods, hovering in the sky?” A sideways look.

Calpernia went quiet, stung, and then green lightning tore apart the sky. The force staggered the earth below it--everything shook hard to the teeth for a moment, vicious enough Leliana reached for Calpernia, held her steady on the stump so neither of them toppled over.

Whatever hum began at the back of her head raised in pitch, all the hairs on her body standing straight on end. Like the beginning of a symphony, or a singer, just beginning to warm her voice. _Ah-ah-ah._ A little string of notes, chords to another world. The pain in her head gave a sigh, spread down her spine.

It cast all the air in curious Fade-green light. They sat together in the quiet, watching the gash in the sky erupt and churn, with rapt attention. Calpernia began the practice of opening and closing her hand, a tic Leliana noticed must be nerves just as much as strengthening her muscles. She stopped it by sliding their fingers together.

Every so often, an earthquake shuddered through the country. Dirt clods on the ground rose up, hovered in the air, and then collapsed. Calpernia eyed them suspiciously.

“Reality,” she said with a sigh, “is so _tenuous._ ”

An hour passed. Calpernia obviously had no bedside manner, but it only would have made the entire affair sour. It was enough not to be alone at the end. Leliana had hardly ever needed anything else. When the shaking became incessant, and Leliana’s vision began to blur, Calpernia dug in the pocket of her shift, and produced a handful of gold.

“This is yours,” Calpernia said. “Your necklace.”

Leliana pushed away her hand. “Do I look like I’ll need it where I’m going?” Her voice roughened.

She felt sick, suddenly--Josephine would never know, nor Cassandra. They would assume she disappeared for some other venture, but she would never come back. Calpernia would tell Havar. Havar would be unsurprised, and hopefully take her north, if she wished. She’d ensure Calpernia could walk out of her home without help, at least. Perhaps that might be enough.

But they would never know closure, and neither would Leliana. The nature of isolation, and all its impressive side-effects, made its consequences known. _In another time_ , she thought desperately. They had years and years left, to fill with wonder and pain and struggle. She could be needed once more, plucked out of the Fade like a

Calpernia closed her hand around the gold chain, put it back in her pocket, turned her attention back to the sky. “Where does it need to go?” she asked, not gently. Clinically. As though they were discussing the placement of agents or troops.

Leliana did not answer. Could not say, _you keep it_. But from the way her stiff, clumsy fingers tightened around her own, it did not need saying. Her grip didn’t loosen, even as minutes passed and passed. Sentimentality—

“Alcestis,” Calpernia said.

Leliana turned her head. “What?”

“ _Alcestis_ ,” she said again, wrinkling her per nose. “Like a wet sneeze.”

The careless way she handed the name to Leliana, as they watched light crack the sky, was worse than being broken into a hundred pieces. As though it, a gift, meant nothing, when she had waded into Leliana’s consciousness with little regard for her own fate. “Ah. Of course.”

Calpernia watched the sky; Leliana watched her face, and the sea-green shadows flickering across it. For a moment, they were at the bottom of the world, entirely alone. “I’ve always hated the damned name. But I suppose someone should know it, and you’ll be dying.”

Her voice shook a little in spite of herself, an off-hand joke. It wasn’t dying, not quite. But the pause stretched between them awkwardly, a space neither understood how to fill. 

“She kept calling it a new world,” Leliana heard herself say. “But nothing changed.” Probably worse, the longer she thought about it.

“One will be born, someday,” Calpernia said, “and I’m sure you’ll be there, plotting in a corner.”

In the distance, dark specks, too far away to be deciphered for shape or identity, began to rise from the earth, swallowed by the breach’s wide mouth. Each one sent a pulse through the trees. Each one felt like a needle through Leliana’s temples. Calpernia went pale; her connection with the Fade, perhaps, made her privy to the pain.

“You think I’ll come back?” Leliana asked. It was the only question she’d wanted to voice.

The silence dreadfully long. More debris rose into the sky, and the ground shook without pause. Rocking, back and forth. It could have soothed.

“If I believe anything about this entirely bizarre situation,” she finally answered, voice mild as mulled wine, “whatever’s at work here will be all too delighted to make you attempt this mortal coil once more.” Another pause. “I’ll be sure to keep you updated on current events.”

She blinked. “Oh?”

“I spend each night in the Fade,” Calpernia muttered, as though divulging this was the same as yanking out an arrow from her thigh, or setting a bone. “You will be there, presumably.”

“What makes you think I’ll want to speak to you?” Leliana asked, the attempted joke sounding lackluster even to her ears. The high song in her ears grew piercing—she could not move at all any longer, and each rattle of the earth jumbled her bones.

But Calpernia’s laugh, hoarse and little-used, beckoned to her like the sun. “Perhaps if you tell yourself that,” she advised, “from now, until the moment you return—”

Everything shuddered then, from the mountains to the cliffs, and the dome of the world blistered with lightning. But when the breach swallowed Corypheus, they were not looking at the sky. The tips of Leliana’s fingers began to glow. Her breathing stopped, and the atmosphere around her vanished. There was pain, the kind to cleave a soul in two, and music, screeched at unrelenting heights. Nothing unfamiliar. But Calpernia wrapped her fingers around her wrists. Warmth blossomed under the skin, a calm settling in her, deep and untouchable. The world began to fragment into shards. Snow, Leliana thought, in spring—

~~~

When the ravens came back, they found the shutters half-open, battered back and forth by wind. Their mews, torn to pieces, held nothing and no one. They fluttered about the rookery, poking at the papers tossed to the floor, a golden box lying empty and unlidded in the corner, a half-empty wine bottle shattered on the floor. What was hidden in the room stayed that way: a box of poisons in vials of green glass tucked under a false floorboard, a book of Chantry hymns arranged for a _coloratura_ soprano, written entirely in Antivan, inside a tome of outdated naval charts. A porcelain shoe the size of a thumbnail, painted with red poppies, forgotten at the back of a drawer.

What could a bird know? Only that nothing remained. Somewhere, far from here, people raised their voices in song and muttered words of cautious thanks under their breath. For them, whether the end drifted farther away or closer to their fingers hardly changed the future of their lives at all. Or so it keenly felt, these days. At least the crack in the sky sealed up. One less thing to worry about.

Skyhold lay quiet. The wind stirred the hay-grass poking out of the spring mud in the courtyard; the tavern sign rocked back and forth on squeaky hinges. Servants lined the walls, muttering to each other. The birds, having investigated their old home as much as they might, flew away.

Far below the mountain’s shadow, a woman dressed in rags sat on a hilltop, head craned at the sky. A scar knitted itself among the clouds, proof the beyond was a door for anyone who tried hard enough. Her hand opened and closed, practicing a fist. She was not alone.


End file.
